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Behold the Canadians, Destroyers of Worlds
Avid Life Media is a Toronto-based company that makes millions on the sexual weakness of others. It runs three sites, Ashley Madison, Cougar Life and Established Men. The first two are for married people
that are looking to be matched up for affairs, the latter for young women who wish to be the mistress of a successful and well-heeled man.
Of course, this service is promised to be 100% safe and discreet.
Yesterday morning they were hacked and someone calling themselves “The Impact Team” is threatening to release the data of all 37 million of their customers unless ALM takes at least two of the sites down.
“Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails. The other websites may stay online.”
What seems to particularly irk The Impact Team is that ALM advertises that they will scrub your information from their servers for a $19 charge and doesn’t deliver.
“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie. Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”
Somebody’s been burned and probably has the legal bills to prove it.
It’s easy to say “Karma is a bear” (for lack of a more colorful euphemism), but in this increasingly web-based world our vulnerabilities are more than evident. Not even the unlimited resources of the federal government are able to keep prying eyes away from our personal data — and in some cases are they are actively trying to weaken the private sector’s ability to do it. (All in the name of national security, of course.)
I guess it’s just a matter of time before the great Ricochet hack, after which I’m made to take the Walk of Shame as an Outed Conservative.
Published in General
Reading Bloomberg’s description of how the site works is depressing. Good lord. It’s like throwing a piece of bread at a flock of pigeons. And the pigeons pay for it!
Depressive depravity! This could be a European film!
After reading the description of the “delete” feature I was simply in awe of the sheer Machiavellian artifice and malice towards their users. It takes a certain kind of businessman to hold your users for ransom in that way.
It’s not often you get to monetize buyer’s remorse. I doubt that feature was in the call to action for the signup:
“We have a feature to wipe your data when you regret this decision… for $20, but signup is free!” Not so much.
I am sure there are cookies that show I have visited some right-wing sites…
Yeah, but Mrs. iWe already knows about us … :D
I’ll keep this in mind in preparation for the great Ricochet hacking incident.
But really, who’s going to bother? Despite all the Rico-founders’ claims that important people are reading the site, does anyone feel like anyone’s actually taking heed? (Some contributors can’t even be bothered to respond to those responding to their posts. And yes, I mean you, James Pethokoukis.)
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Frankly, when the knock comes, I’d be insulted if you didn’t sell me out. Well, not you specifically, but a generic you.
Look, I just don’t want to dance from the scaffold after you.
Excellent post, Troy–you’re on fire!
You wanna be first to do the grim fandango?
Bragging rights.
Whoa, I don’t know what it says about me that I don’t find this offer terribly Machiavellian. If you’re gonna pander to adulterers in the first place, it simply makes sense. Likewise, if you’re already an abortionist, why not put the forceps in the place least likely to damage those little livers? By the time these people even have the opportunity to introduce these “extra services”, they’ve already sold their evil.
We might feel better if these people were evil and inefficient, but there’s no reason we should expect them to see it that way.
This has been covered:
http://succeedinevil.com/
From the blurb:
Now wouldn’t it be something if the hackers were the people originally behind the websites? Easy collection at both ends.
The devil will be in the details of what these hackers release.
If they release only the information which users of these sites previously published themselves (i.e. their profile information), then I don’t actually see much of a problem. It would be basically akin to what archive.org already does (though they don’t track content from behind paywalls).
A person cannot logically have any expectation of privacy for information that they already published for anybody to see, simply because they have since removed the information from the internet.
That would be like a political candidate suing their opponent on privacy grounds simply because the opponent quoted something stupid the candidate once published in college.
Once you publish information, it’s no longer private. Full stop. The idea of something being “published but private” is an oxymoron. Publish = public. Q.E.D.
Never, ever, ever publish anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t want on the front page of the local newspaper, even if writing under a pseudonym, or from behind a paywall, or from within a “password-protected” sandbox.
Passwords don’t prevent people from taking a screengrab of what you’ve written, and pseudonyms don’t protect you if you include enough personal information in your writings for others to figure out your identity.
However…
If these hackers release information that wasn’t previously published, like credit card numbers for example, that would be a bridge too far. That would be theft of private information.
How much would EJ pay not to be outed? This is for purely theoretical grounds. Say I set up a PayPal account and threaten how much could I collect for the Dime Global Initiative. For DocJay, I would publish the good things he does just to wreck his wild image but like I said I want to explore the theoretical aspects.
Go ahead and out me Dime, I’m still not going to date you.
Hey, if I was writing posts speculating that Hillary was going to cut taxes on the rich, I wouldn’t want to read the comments either. Which is the only reason I haven’t mentioned to James that I have a bridge that I could sell him… Cheap…
That she knows of.
I was mostly in awe of the ability to monetize user inactivity. That’s usually impossible. The evil bit I get.
Usually a business is supposed to provide some value to the user, in the instance of ALM they were able to leverage their morally dubious business model and the regret most of their users felt quite naturally.
I wonder if it was really about provoking users to engage with the core model of the site. As in, the regretful user wants to back out, but sees the fee to do so, and then is able to overcome the psychic barrier and says “what the hell,” chats up some mistress and then he’s locked in.
Either way ALM gets paid, but it’s just that little nudge someone needs to get them across the line, from which there is no going back.
Cougar Life isn’t for cheaters. It’s simply a dating site for older women and younger men.
The hackers’ argument is that AshleyMadison facilitates adultery, and EstablishedMen facilitates prostitution.
As hackers go, they seem to have a very traditional (dare I say, conservative) view of sexual morality.
As would all the venture capitalists who turned down the offer to fund enterprises such as AshleyMad.
It’s not an easy occupation.
If the info is released, she should look for his name.
“But honey, I have to have a login so I can check sales reports!”
Is it inconceivable that a Ricochetois may want to run for public office some day, and that they might hypothetically not want everything they ever wrote on Ricochet to become publicized as their work?
One of the big dangers of online fora is that, especially when they are civil and welcoming, people feel free to explore ideas and hypotheticals without having come to any firm conclusions. This is precisely the kind of speech which can be chopped up and taken out of context to make someone look really awful.
Sometimes it’s as easy as editing out the “just for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that” part of a sentence to make someone look worse than Hitler.
This isn’t such a crazy defense. I’ve had an account at OkCupid because they have a really interesting blog on data analysis that is only available to members.
Fear is the mind-killer.
You’re ok with saying that in public, cupid?
He sounds like Number 2 from Austin Powers.
“But Dr. Evil, we make exponentially more money from our legitimate businesses!!!”
Doc,
That hurts. I mean why Frank and not me.
Mithio,
I like the way you think. How many Members could we sign up to the Denny Hastert level?