The Perfect Crime

When the news first broke about the Ashley Madison data intrusion, I’ll admit that my reaction wasn’t very mature: I regarded it as an amusing example of schadenfreude and watched all of the stories about people threating lawsuits because their lives had been “ruined” with the sort of glee we reserve for other people’s misfortunes. It’s not that I had or have anything against these people – I’m not a prude, and I’m not about to start trying to tell other people how to live their lives – it’s just that the level of naiveté involved was hilarious. All of us have a certain amount of personal information online, and are accepting a corresponding amount of personal risk, but very few people are ever going to share information that could destroy their entire lives with an organization whose business model is based on helping customers betray someone else. A new analysis of the leaked information suggests that the joke may be on the Ashley Madison users in more ways than one, however…

You can pick up Annalee Newitz’s excellent article direct from the Gizmodo website if you’d like to see the actual numbers, but if this report is accurate then less than .03% of the A/M accounts were actually being used by female clients in the first place. The company’s own user data already indicated that male users outnumbered female users by nearly six to one, but the Gizmodo report shows that males outnumber females on the company’s internal chat function by 4,579 to one, while approximately 13,585 men use the company’s message function for every female who does. And those figures don’t even include male users who registered as female when they signed up for the site, which is apparently very common. There is also good evidence that thousands, or possibly tens of thousands, of the nominally female accounts on the site were created in-house by Ashley Madison personnel in order to attract male customers…

If those numbers and accusations seem familiar, it’s probably because we’ve been seeing similar charges leveled at conventional dating sites for almost as long as this category of web businesses has existed. For all of the company’s efforts to market itself as a specialized service for adulterers, it appears to be nothing more than a very expensive dating site. And while criminal prosecution for leaving all of these clients’ personal information vulnerable to data theft seems unlikely, what struck me was that the company’s primary defense against accusations of fraud – and demands for refunds – has just evaporated along with the supposed confidentiality of the users…

Prior to the data breech, the odds of any given Ashley Madison user taking the company to court – or pressing any criminal charges, for that matter – was negligible, not because of the constant disclaimers all over the site, but because any potential disgruntled users would be exposing themselves as adulterers (or would-be adulterers, at least) the moment they publically admitted to joining the site in the first place. The company didn’t even need to create faked accounts, really, other than for marketing purposes (“Look! See how many attractive women there are on our site!”), because who was going to complain?

Now, we should probably acknowledge that running a profitable dating site is a difficult proposition, and doing so without providing a conduit for illicit affairs – or stalkers, predators, thieves, and other criminals for that matter – is going to be impossible given the nature of Internet connections. Maintaining a balance between people of both genders and a variety of other selection factors (e.g. age, income level, location, interests, physical appearance, and other demographics) wasn’t easy even in the pre-Internet days, when a single year of an old-style dating service (face-to-face introductions) cost around $3,600 a year in today’s money. With no personal contact, and therefore no way to tell who was being honest about their identity and who was lying through his or her teeth, there’s no way the company could have prevented a situation where male users outnumbered females 6 to 1 or even 13,000 to one. It seems unfortunate that they should have chosen to obfuscate, rather than just providing the service and letting the cards fall where they might…

I’m not sure how this one is going to end. Will the company go under? Will any of the litigation being filed against them come to anything? Will people learn from their misfortunes, or possibly from the misfortunes of others, and stop putting information online that could cost them everything they have? It is possible that at least some people out there in cyberspace will take this as a wake-up call; it’s even possible that it might make a few people stop and reflect on whether they really want to go through with cheating on their spouse in the first place. Perhaps in the long run people will be more careful, consider the potential consequences of their actions, treat their customers more honestly and deal with each other more openly, and the Internet in general will become a slightly less awful place…

Just between you and me, though, I would not put money on it…