Ashley Madison is not a traditional dating site. Aimed at people who want to have an affair and cheat on their partners, it’s been highly controversial since day 1 of its existence, and some have been speculating that this was the whole point of the service in the first place. All of this controversy in the news must have generated a lot of traffic for them, and there’s no denying that the site wouldn’t be where it is today if people didn’t talk about it so much in the past.
Recently however, the whole website – including all of its users – found themselves in a lot of trouble, as a group of anonymous hackers announced that they had broken into the company’s databases and stolen all of the users’ information, including credit card data, full names and addresses. The hackers threatened to release the full set of information unless the site was shut down forever.
And to prove their point, they leaked a small sample of two names, which circulated the news for a while and managed to stir up some small scandals. After that, the news went quiet and it looked like the storm had passed over. However, now the tables have turned as the complete leak was released to the public, and people have been frantically searching through the databases trying to find out if their partners had cheated on them.
It’s shaping up to be quite the messy situation for Ashley Madison, with various prominent names already popping up in the list – among the more interesting ones, so far we’ve read about Josh Duggar, government officials from Georgia, as well as several high-ranking politicians.
While it’s expected that the more powerful people affected by the leak are going to retaliate against Ashley Madison with their own resources, even the smaller individuals are still taking action, joining massive class-action lawsuits that are currently being prepared against the company. It’s clear at this point that the website doesn’t have much of a future in it.
Even if they recover from the huge legal mess that this situation is, nobody in their right mind would sign up for an account at that website anymore, especially after certain worrying details about its method of operation were brought to light.
For example, the site charges its users money for deleting their accounts – it’s not possible to remove one’s data from its servers otherwise. However, as it turns out, paying the fee actually does nothing – other than line the company’s pockets anyway – as the information was never really deleted and was still accessible to the hackers who compromised the website.
This has been a major point of worrying for some people who’ve used the website in the past and trusted the paid delete option to do what it was advertised for. Some of the names being leaked right now were apparently of people who were under the impression that their accounts had been closed a long time ago, and this has been causing further trouble for the company.
Some have been questioning the ethics of the whole situation, and it’s actually an interesting point once we take a step back and look at what’s going on. Removing the nature of the website from the equation, this boils down to hackers leaking the private information of a lot of people, and the Internet is actually happy about it for once. There’s no outrage, just a lot of support for the hackers all over the web.