The Ashley Madison hack has generated a media frenzy of sizable proportions and it seems that we will be hearing a lot more about the people who have been exposed as members of the adultery-centered website.
The ethical and moral implications of having a profile on hookup site, even one that requires a paid subscription, are clearly debatable. And whether or not the hackers had any true higher cause for breaching their privacy is extremely difficult to decide it seems.
The hacker group behind this sizable data breach is called the Impact Team and they have leaked the profile data of 36 million users of the Ashley Madison platform, along with the financial information included in the payment plans of the users.
At the moment, there is a website that makes it extremely easy to find out if anyone from your partner or spouse, to you friends, coworkers, public figures to state workers, because all you have to do is introduce their e-mail in a search engine and you can find out whether or not they had a profile on Ashley Madison.com.
However, the best possible way of dealing with this is taking everything with a grain of salt. The fact that a person might have created a profile on a hookup site does not imply that the person actually had an affair, or even that he/she had the intention to do so.
Curiosity is what drives pretty much anybody who has ever used the internet to access websites that have absolutely nothing to do with their likes or interests.
People usually do this to explore things that they normally would never even talk about publicly, because the internet was initially viewed as anonymous means of accessing information and it created this idea of safety, that gave people the space they needed to explore a wide variety of things.
Considering the extremely tempting advertisement campaign that Ashley Madison has become famous for, joining out of pure curiosity makes quite a lot of sense and it could be a completely innocent experiment.
Furthermore, it was the Impact Team itself that revealed that Ashley Madison included numerous false profiles for women, so that the men would have a reason to join, which essentially means that most of the people included in the leaked profile data actually didn’t have anything close to an affair.
In fact, it is the same type of curiosity driving people to access the leaked data website and this is something worth considering when judging the people revealed to have been members of the Ashley Madison community.
The fact that the leaked data website was actually overrun with visitors, so much so that its server eventually caved due to overuse, should provide some insight into the extent of people’s curiosity online and should change the perspective that Ashley Madison users are regarded from.
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