You may remember that in July, anonymous hackers threatened to reveal stolen personal information of some 40 million users of the controversial dating website (Ashley Madison’s tagline: Life is short. The process involves a hard-delete” of users’ profile information, posted pictures and messages. Last month, a group of hackers known as The Impact Team claimed to be behind an attack on Ashley Madison—whose tagline is “Life is short. Now, for those of you (genuinely) not aware of this company, it was essentially a dating service for married people. We cannot say the exact ratio as the database is huge but we’ve met several already in the first hundred of profiles.
According to the complaint, this included information that the defendants had retained on users who had paid $19 for a Full Delete” service to purportedly remove their data from the site network. At 6.3 per cent, Canada tops the list of countries ranked by the share of the population with Ashley Madison accounts. Rather, it is necessary to consider whether the safeguards in place at the time of the data breach were sufficient having regard to, for PIPEDA, the ‘sensitivity of the information’, and for the APPs, what steps were ‘reasonable in the circumstances’.
The hackers mocked the site and the customer base, saying that 90% to 95% of the users were male. Surveys show that four out of five American preteens use some form of social media, with YouTube being the most popular but Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat also widely used — even though all four services officially prohibit users younger than 13. This is a much more accurate representation of the place the Ashley Madison cheater occupies in the public mind: married people so thirsty they make cartoon wolves look like Buddhist monks.
If you didn’t know this spot was called Poly,” it would probably make you wonder if Ashley Madison has decided to atone for its past by turning itself into a website where married people can post ads about how deeply satisfied they are with watching Netflix and having sex with only one person for the rest of their lives. Sex is a http://ru-bride.org/ashleymadison-review.html major motivator for people signing up on Ashley Madison. Interestingly, less than a month before that episode, AshleyMadison executives seemed very keen on completing a series of internal security assessments, audits and security awareness training exercises for employees.
Today, Ashley Madison website rates top along with several other leading dating websites regarding user protection and security. Instead of looking at Ashley Madison as a dating site, I think it’s more accurate to call it an anti-community—a hugely popular social site where it’s impossible to be social, because the men can’t talk to each other, most of the women are fake, and the only interaction available is with credit card payments. Ashley Madison claims there is 1.1 female account for every male one.
The hackers claiming responsibility for the Ashley Madison data breach, a group known as the Impact Team, released a 30-gigabyte archive that it said to include emails from Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman late last week. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if, in the final analysis, they discover that the so-called ‘data breach’ was perpetrated by the owners of Ashley Madison themselves, and that it was always their plan to blackmail their clientele. Of all the recent large-scale data breaches, of which there have been many, the Ashley Madison ‘hack’ has attracted the most interest and the greatest number of column inches in the press.