Last Friday, Noel Biderman, CEO of Avid Life Media Inc. — the parent company of Ashley Madison — stepped down from his position. Biderman’s resignation arrived in the wake of the third wave of leaks from the extramarital-affairs website.
For those somehow out of the loop, Ashley Madison is a dating service that promotes extramarital affairs. Following the discovery that the website had kept user information even after some users paid to have it deleted, a collective of hackers calling themselves "Impact Team" stole user data, employee email exchanges and more from the website back in July. Impact Team then threatened to release the information it had collected unless Ashley Madison ceased operations. It didn’t shake out that way.
The personal nature of the data contained within the leaks has — like whirlwind stories are wont to do — captivated both the U.S. and the world at large, emitting a ripple effect felt by multiple segments of society. In yet another instance of politicians behaving poorly, multiple accounts (more than 15,000, according to The Hill) were identified as government and military email addresses. Josh Duggar’s reputation as a hypocritical practitioner of Christian dogma was reinforced when multiple emails registered to him were found.
Putting it mildly, a lot of people’s lives were negatively affected by the leak. For many Internet users not implicated by it, the leak is seen as justice being properly dispensed. In comment sections, jokes about divorce lawyers making bank and anticipation for cheaters being found out characterize much of the dialogue on the matter.
As we see it, there is not a single party involved in this debacle that comes out of it looking like an angel. As a business endeavor, Ashley Madison is inherently manipulative, selling lonely and unhappy men the fantasy of a service that would enable them to find sexual gratification. In reality, of the 35 million profiles exposed by the leak, only 5 million belonged to women, a dismal number the company went to great lengths to conceal.
The hackers, despite purportedly operating under the Robin Hood-like intention of exposing Ashley Madison as a corrupt institution, have shattered the lives of many. Is cheating on your partner — or in the case of most Ashley Madison users, attempting to cheat — a scuzzy, morally selfish thing to do? Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Just because individuals who used Ashley Madison were operating in a morally gray area does not mean they deserved to have their privacy ripped away from them. In leaking the data Ashley Madison claimed they had deleted, the hackers have proved to be no better than the very people they decried.
The people not directly involved may be the worst of all. The mob mentality that has emerged from news coverage of this story has been equal parts enlightening and horrifying. We have yet to read a story from a major news source that truly discusses the world we now live in, wherein one’s personal information can be held hostage at the whims of hackers and corporate executives. Neither the news nor commenters have yet to really touch upon the frightening implications of the leak and are instead content to gawk and leer at those who had the bad luck to have their private details become available to the Internet.
Although no one will admit it, this Ashley Madison affair is much bigger than poor schmucks who looked for love in all the wrong places.
