I’m not monogamous and think it’s unreasonable to always see it as a default but I still have little sympathy for active cheaters. I have friends with a history of cheating but they know that I will tell their new partners about that history. I don’t go out of my way to mess up their relationships but I don’t cover for them.
However, privacy leaks are a very serious problem, while my dislike of cheaters is a purely personal issue.
I have no sympathy for cheaters who are caught or outed, but I have every sympathy for people’s personal info getting tossed around. And I do have sympathy for cheaters getting harassed by strangers. There is no reason to get involved in a stranger’s fidelity issues.
I get dating-site signups sent to my @gmail.com email address by other people from around the world at least weekly. Ashley Madison is probably among the least shady or non-normative among them.
I’ve had several come to me from Ashley Madison, including one from as far away as Australia if I recall correctly. Most of them are from the UK, and many are from the US. I live in Canada - a few come from here as well. I get personal information of all kinds coming my way from people who are either dumb or are “cleverly” using my generic-sounding email address to have accounts set up for all manner of things. I used to try to cancel these accounts, but it just takes too much time (and probably gives “signs of life” to unscrupulous folks who will just spam me or give the information to others to attempt to exploit it).
All of which is to say, concluding that the mere presence of someone’s email address in this database or others like it means they are the one who signed up for it (let alone that they every used the account) is not necessarily a well-founded conclusion.
This is big enough to be a national security issue.
Consider the Office of Personnel Management data breach reported a couple months ago. The identities, financial information, personal details and more, for millions of American government employees with security clearances, plus their relatives. 21.5 million people total. Details on which of them are in financial difficulty. Even 1.1 million fingerprints, making secret agents no longer safe even if their names are changed
China (and whoever they trade the data to) now knows who they are, and the financial data narrows down who to target for recruitment.
Now leverage this with the Ashley Madison leak, 37 million registered users exposed. You can bet that the Chinese and others are cross-referencing the two datasets to see who has a security clearance AND is cheating on their spouse. Or who is married to someone with a security clearance, and is cheating or being cheated on. Sorted by financial difficulty.
Foreign intelligence officials will no doubt be doing the same thing for all those UK government email addresses that showed up in the Ashley Madison leak.
Ashley Madison charged people money to delete their accounts - which probably struck people as kind of blackmailish. Then they didn’t actually delete that information?
Considering how often notifications of fake/other people’s accounts for… very niche dating sites land in my inbox, I could see this being a fruitful business model. Obtain mass quantities of email addresses from a large data breach (Home Depot, Target, Adobe, Gawker, etc.), set up straw-man accounts in those people’s names, then offer to nuke the accounts for a fee. Not many people would ultimately pay, but how much does it cost you to do this in bulk?
I’m actually somewhat concerned about this as well - my email address is frequently used by others to sign up for things, including dating sites. Usually I unsubscribe and delete the emails, but in some cases I will actually go to the site and change the login information so that at the very least the person who fraudulently signed “me” up for something doesn’t get the benefit of access. These people aren’t using my real name or other details, but it’s possible someone might assume that the email was real and the name was fake.
Indeed, at first I actively tried to cancel or deny access to some of these bogus accounts as they arose but became uncomfortable for the same reason. It’s frustrating, even the ones that send a “verification” email sometimes bombard my inbox with messages right after, so obviously the verification is phony… buy their un-verification protocols typically point to a login screen (at least from mobile). You can do a password reset to get around that, but then you’re just waist-deep in a waste of time.
Well I get someone else’s student loan statements from Naviant, beverage orders from liquor distributors in Arizona, and updates about real estate listings in Las Vegas from Realtor.com where apparently someone signed up for a paid account using my email, and I actually can’t cancel that account without having the real estate agent’s license number. And yes, my email address has been used to sign up for Ashley Madison.
I actually got so annoyed with the real estate agent that I tracked her down on the internet and called her on the phone. She was defensive and annoyed, but the emails stopped.
For me its cable, phone, medical, and moving and renovation bills; pizza delivery notifications; pension benefits and paystubs; uhaul rental location trasactions; private jet leasing requests; the list is endless. Just wait until one of the folks spreading your address hither and yon starts to apply to colleges…
I’ve actually cancelled people’s pizza orders just out of spite. I don’t know if it actually worked but I’d like to think they went hungry and learned the lesson about using someone else’s email address to order food.
I always think about doing this, but wonder if draconion American laws about hacking might somehow classify this kind of thing as a form of economic terrorism.
I consider what they’re doing to be identity theft, so to the extent that email is used as a verification of a person’s identity, I consider it my right to cancel accounts and orders made in “my name.” I’ve also changed details on social media accounts and dating sites before changing the password on the account. I like to think that it causes them some shame when they realize they’ve got a facebook account that says that they’re a huge Bieber fan, and they can’t do anything about it. Then again, they probably are a huge Bieber fan.
Much is being made of the “cheating spouse” angle on this site, but there’s no restriction on who enrolls, and there are quite a lot of marriages where discrete dating on the side is part of the happy consenting deal.
And of course, those people are ‘cheaters’ now. So shame on the sinners, etc.
This is a privacy violation of a kind with the theft of private nude photos, a sex-based crime, for us to shame and gawk at. Forgive me if I fail to be delighted by this.
I would also wager that a vast number of these accounts are bogus or sockpuppets without an actual person behind them. Most dating sites are virtual sausage-fests with guys unknowingly driving trollies other guys hoping to snag one of the very few real females. I have doubts that much actual cheating originated from AM.
