I doubted this would be the
end of the company, or the story, however. The “Post-Truth” era was, mercifully,
still years in the future, but it was already hard to imagine that anyone who
was really desperate enough for illicit sex to risk offering their credit card
information to an online company for that purpose would be deterred by the fact
that somewhere between 70% and 95% of the “women” on the site didn’t really
exist. While the data breach might scare off some of the saner or less
desperate prospects, thus interfering with future sales, the company’s losses
in the affair were only a $1.6 million fine and possibly the loss of a handful
of men whose partners genuinely didn’t realize they were looking for something
on the side. That would, however, still level tens of millions, if not hundreds
of millions, of sleazy men who are bad at math thinking that despite the
35-to-one odds of actually finding a real women on Ashley Madison, they might
be the one to get lucky…
This week brought a new
wrinkle in the case, however. The USA Today site published a story about a
report issued by Ashley Madison, listing the cities in which the largest number
of new accounts have been started over the last year. The first thing that
caught my eye was the lack of raw data; there are twenty cities listed in the
linked article, but no indication of what size the client base in each of them
might be. Does this mean that Dallas has 10,000 more cheaters than Chicago, or
only 10? Or are there really only a dozen or so active accounts in each one,
and is the company trying to convince people in those cities that someone
will/might actually be available to sleep with them if they sign up? But then
it gets worse…
The article goes on to say
that Ashley Madison now has over 54 million accounts, up from the 36 million or
so they had three years ago, and that the accounting firm of Ernst & Young
now reviews their accounts list to verify that all of the accounts are for
real. This isn’t impossible, of course; E&Y does perform that kind of
audit, and some of their customers do have account lists of that size or even
larger. The problem here is, even if they can verify that the accounts are
active, how can they verify the existence of 54 million distinct customers –
or, indeed, any particular number of customers – without completely violating
the privacy of all of those people? And, one assumes, whatever confidentiality agreement
Ashley Madison has with its customers…
More to the point, perhaps,
how does any auditor, no matter how discrete, manage to determine how many
people are actually using their Ashley Madison accounts, even if those people
really do exist and are actually paying for their accounts? Assuming, of
course, that anyone out there is going to believe a word the company says after
the revelations of 2015. It would be nice to believe that there aren’t 54
million people out there who are capable of affording the cost of their Ashley
Madison accounts and computer-literate enough to sign up for one who are also
gullible enough to believe that this time the company is telling the whole
truth – in effect, that the company is once again lying through its teeth…
But then I look at some of
the other things that people in this country have been claiming to believe this
week, and I have to wonder…
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