Secrets of online adulterers in the hands of hackers
TENS of millions of adulterers could be exposed after a website for extramarital affairs suffered a cyber attack and hackers threatened to name its users.
Ashley Madison, which has 37.5 million members, including 1.2 million Britons, encourages people to cheat on their spouses.
The hackers, going by the name “The Impact Team”, posted a sample of data yesterday and demanded that the site be taken down. If it is not, they said they would release the names, addresses, credit card details and “sexual fantasies” of members. Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, said it was investigating.
We French may have invented the cinq
à-sept, and historically enjoy a particularly relaxed attitude to marital fidelity. In fact, conservative estimates suggest that a third of married citoyens here have strayed. Even so, the hacking of AshleyMadison. com represents our collective worst nightmare.
Some 37 million people have signed up to the American “dating website” – motto “Life is Short. Have an Affair” – presumably expecting to conduct illicit encounters on the sly. Yet now their details are in the possession of cyber criminals who threaten to release names, addresses and “secret sexual fantasies”.
In the rest of the world this may prompt at most a snigger or two. But here in the home of adultery, it amounts to the end of civilisation as we know it. Forget Edward Snowden, this is the data breach to shock the French world.
There are some 300 French-speaking cheating sites. The market leader is Gledeen, which boasts on large Métro station hoardings that it has been created “by women for women” (so cannily enticing male users with the idea that they might find a genuine partner online, rather than, shall we say, more professional offerings). Gledeen has several hundred thousand French members, and I can only imagine what must be going through their minds now.
It’s not that, should similar exposure occur, they fear being damned for their extra-marital affairs. But the key point in France is that, when it comes to cheating, everyone must remain discreet. Lying is the accepted way of things, including for the betrayed spouse. The French could not see what Bill Clinton, to name one celebrated twotimer, had done wrong. “Of course he lied,” we shrugged. That’s what a gentleman does.
We understand, like the late French-British financier Jimmy Goldsmith (he who famously said that a man who marries his mistress creates a job vacancy) that the point of adultery is not to break up a marriage, but to spice it up. You’re bored, the zest has gone out of things, you snap at your partner, the kids suffer. Who wants that? Straying a little, with no intention of making the affair too permanent, more often than not reminds you that everyone must make an effort in a marriage. Covering your tracks, buying flowers and making up in silence for your little walk on the wild side: all of this works far better than the vastly overrated AngloSaxon sin of sincerity at all costs. To us, before being your lover, your wife is your greatest ally and best friend, and you don’t want to hurt your best friend.
There are no words more grim a French woman (or man) can hear than: “We need to talk.” For, the reasoning goes, as long as your partner lies about what is really nothing more than a peccadillo, he or she still wants to stay in the marriage. The minute they own up, it’s over. The loss of face alone would kill the relationship. (Apologies are not the French way: we see it, Roman arena-like, as an admission of weakness, and give it the thumbs-down.) It’s hard to pretend there’s nothing to own up to, however, if details of your liaison are splashed all over the internet for everyone to see.
Last month it was reported that the US embassy is bugging the French government from the roof of its embassy. But only one data breach scandalises French society. So keep that affair top secret.