Private detectives and divorce lawyers are making plans to buy boats and summer homes as the fallout from the Ashley Madison hack continues to, well, fall out. As security expert Brian Krebs reported on Sunday, large caches of stolen data from the dating site, which is devoted to extramarital affairs, were posted online by a group of hackers last week. That data included not just identifying information, but financial data. As many as 37 million users of the site were affected. Ashley Madison is owned by Avid Life Media (ALM), which also owns the “hookup” websites “Cougar Life” and “Established Men.”
“Besides snippets of account data apparently sampled at random from among some 40 million users across ALM’s trio of properties, the hackers leaked maps of internal company servers, employee network account information, company bank account data, and salary information,” writes Krebs. “The compromise comes less than two months after intruders stole and leaked online user data on millions of accounts from hookup site AdultFriendFinder. … According to the hackers, although the ‘full delete’ feature that Ashley Madison advertises promises ‘removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site,’ users’ purchase details – including real name and address – aren’t actually scrubbed.”
That’s significant because Ashley Madison has been marketing its site and selling its services using this “full delete” feature as an inducement. Want to have an affair? Don’t want the Internet – which never forgets anything – to come back to haunt you in divorce court later? You can relax and conduct your extramarital affair in full confidence knowing Ashley Madison can cover your tracks and erase all digital evidence of your infidelity. Except, of course, that you can’t, as the hackers have shown us.
This data breach at Ashley Madison has also done serious financial harm to ALM. “The website’s Canadian parent hoped to raise up to $200 million by listing its shares in London this year, five years after a lack of investor appetite caused it to cancel an attempt to list at home,” writes Alistair Sharp for Business Insider. “The data breach, bad for any company that has a repository of confidential customer data, could be disastrous for one whose business model is based on complete confidentiality.” Any hopes ALM had for an IPO abroad would seem to be dashed, at least for the time being – and all because the sites internal data were illegally accessed and shared.
The public has grown numb to massive data breaches. They happen so frequently that we’ve stopped caring unless we are directly affected. Millions of people in North America don’t know or don’t care that any website to which they’re registered retains personal data that can and will come out. If your Netflix account is compromised, that’s not so big a deal. If the accounts you use to meet and have adulterous sex with strangers are compromised, that has serious ramifications for the rest of your life. “Putting aside the issue of doing it in the first place, many of the men and women who use AshleyMadison were apparently unaware – or didn’t care – that most websites now take every scrap of data they can and assemble highly detailed profiles of their users,” writes Jordan Robertson. “So even if you don’t think you’re giving away identifiable information, you probably are.”
Given that Ashley Madison and its parent company are based in Toronto, it isn’t surprising that the site is popular in Canada. Still, it was something of a shock when news came out this week that a staggering 20 percent of Ottawa residents – one in every five – subscribes to the site. Of course, the fact that a website devoted to cheating on one’s spouse has millions of members should probably shock and horrify us. It is a testament to the moral depravity and decay in which society is now mired that most of us blink and let that fact pass us by.
“The exposure [of Ashley Madison’s internal data] prompted a business boom for the divorce lawyers and private investigators in [Canada’s] capital city, which is Ashley Madison’s No. 1 Canadian hookup hub and potentially the site’s highest per capita globally,” explains Meg Wagner. “That means Ashley Madison’s nearly 200,000 Ottawa cheaters could be exposed.”
“I imagine a lot of veiled threats will be made following the hacking of … Ashley Madison,” concedes Jacqueline Newman, an attorney writing for CNBC. “Is it legal for a spouse who learns of his/her spouse’s infidelity through this hack to use it in divorce case? Or does it fall under the theory of being fruit from the poisonous tree? If the spouse obtains the information via legitimate means (off the long list of names that could be revealed on the Internet), it is my belief that it can be admissible evidence during a divorce case.”
Newman points out, though, that in most states, the courts simply won’t care. Our legal system no longer bothers with issues of infidelity in most jurisdictions. “The only way a judge would be interested in a litigant’s love life,” writes Newman, “is if it affects the children of the marriage or the finances. So, if a spouse has lied in a legal document about not spending money on extra-marital affairs, and his or her name appears on the Ashley Madison client list, then that person’s credibility could be questioned. Often, people will use posts on social media simply to impeach one’s credibility in divorce cases.”
Marriage in North America is already broken. A high percentage of marriages end in divorce. The very definition of marriage has been redefined by the United States Supreme Court, opening the inevitable door to plural marriage and any number of other permutations. When cheating on your marriage becomes a business, however, we have crossed some kind of marital Rubicon from which there will be no return. When infidelity and adultery become something for which banks schedule IPOs, society has become inevitably and irrevocably sick.
There are any number of valid reasons for a marriage to end. Treating the willful violation of those vows as a commercial enterprise is a depravity for which there can be no excuse.
Media wishing to interview Phil Elmore, please contact [email protected].
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