AshleyMadison— tagline “Life Is Short. Have An Affair”— is an online site that facilitates cheating among its 37 million users. It’s a service founded on confidentiality and privacy, which now seems to have all of its data in the hands of hackers. They’re demanding the company take down the site, or they’re going to out a lot of adulterers. The hackers, going by the name “The Impact Team,” posted a small sample of sensitive data (since taken offline) stolen from Avid Life Media, the company that owns AshleyMadison, along with other hookup sites Cougar Life and Established Men. The data was accompanied by a statement, demanding the takedown of AshleyMadison and Established Men. If that doesn’t happen, the hackers are threatening to leak the full details—names, addresses, sexual fantasies—of AshleyMadison’s 37 million users.
That muffled sound you just heard was the collective tightening of 40 million colons nationwide. As if trying to rationalize the moral trespass that is infidelity wasn’t stressful enough, now these folks must live with the terror of knowing that their perfidy and lack of integrity will be splashed across the Internet.
It would be easy to wax moralistic about the dilemma so many currently face, but that’s a discussion best left for another time. I’ll just pass along the advice that a very wise person once shared with me. She told me that if you’re not doing anything you shouldn’t be, you never have to fear being discovered and outed.
Words to live by, those….
It’s easy to get caught up in the trap of “Oh, it’s a private Internet site; what could possibly wrong?” This hack, as like so many others, are object lessons that the more we put ourselves out there digitally, the greater the chance that something might come back on us. If that something is a betrayal or moral quandary- like adultery, f’rinstance- and your personal data is compromised, you run the risk of not being able to control how, when, and/or if that information is made public.
The moral of the story- outside of the ramifications of adultery, of course- is that nothing is ever private. If you want to sneak around behind that back of your Significant Other, you’re going to be better off doing it the old fashioned way. Or you could just follow a rule I (sometimes rather imperfectly) try to follow: Never allow anything of yours on the Internet that you wouldn’t want your mother to see.
This seems a tough way to learn a lesson…but sympathy only goes so far for something you brought on yourself. It might just be time to try doing what you can to set things right…because before long, that option may no longer be available to you.
