Dating site data affair drags on for locals
Affair seekers in the United States burned by a data breach at the Ashley Madison dating website will soon be eligible for a financial compensation package.
But they may feel cheated: a tentative court settlement agreed to by Ashley Madison’s parent company, Toronto-based Ruby Life Inc., limits individual payouts to US$3,500 for documented, valid claims.
The $11.2-million settlement must still be approved by the U.S. District Court in Missouri, where the class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of 37 million (mostly male) Ashley Madison account holders.
It will not affect thousands of Canadian victims, including Ottawa’s Eliot Shore, the representative plaintiff in a national class proceeding against Ruby Life Inc.
Shore, a disabled widower, joined Ashley Madison to look for companionship after losing his wife of more than 30 years to breast cancer in March 2014.
He said the U.S. settlement was small considering the website used fake awards to give users a false sense of security.
“It’s good that they did get some comeuppance, it is,” Shore said Monday. “But I’m not holding my breath waiting for anything.”
A lawyer working on the Canadian class-action lawsuit, Glenn Brandys, said the U.S. settlement does not necessarily mean that a similar deal will be reached here.
The Canadian class action, which has yet to be certified, is seeking $760 million in damages.
“There are different laws for liability in both jurisdictions, so it’s usually not one domino falling after the other,” he said. “You usually have to prove your case in each jurisdiction.”
A previously published Citizen analysis of the leaked data revealed that about 1,200 people from Ottawa paid to access the Ashley Madison website between April and June 2015. About 20 City of Ottawa emails were included in that group.
Another 600 email addresses ended in gc.ca, the standard format for most federal government employees.
In July 2015, a group of hackers who styled themselves as the “The Impact Team” accessed the company’s computer network and downloaded the personal and financial data of Ashley Madison customers.
The Impact Team threatened to publish the data unless the company shut down the website for cheaters, which exhorted users, “Life is short. Have an affair.”
One month later, the hackers dumped a huge cache of customer data on an encrypted “dark web” site. The stolen data included customers’ names, addresses, birth dates and sexual preferences.
In a statement released to explain its U.S. settlement, Ruby Life Inc. denied any wrongdoing in the case and insisted that individuals named in the data dump were not necessarily actual members of Ashley Madison.
Still, the public exposure created a firestorm.
It may have led some people to take their own lives, while others lost jobs or marriages. Some were subjected to blackmail.
Last year, Canada’s privacy commissioner investigated the data breach and issued a report that found the Ashley Madison website had “inadequate security safeguards and policies.”
It ordered Ruby Life Inc. to take measures to prevent data theft and to remove phoney security awards from its website.