The Ashley effect
The end of privacy as we know it
Last July 19, news broke that a hacker group that calls itself “Impact Team” was able to get account details for about 32 million Ashley Madison users, partial credit card information, payment transactions, and even some photos.
News of the security breach prompted various reactions, with most of society giving a collective smirk. “Who knew paying money to cheat on your spouse had consequences?” tweeted ‘Just Call Me Mister’. Kentucky Mayor Andrew H. Scott chuckled online: “LOL. We’re going to need (a) bigger courthouse.” Some praised the hackers, while others showed anger, saying that the cheaters deserved what they got.
On the surface, the motivations of Impact Team seem morally fueled. They targeted two of Canadian firm Avid Life Media’s (ALM) sites - AshleyMadison.com and ExceptionalMen.com – a site that connects beautiful young women with sugar daddies.
The hackers also criticized the security of ALM’s sites. For companies that bank on the clandestine nature of their services, ALM’s security and privacy protections were laughable, said the hackers. They “made it easy for anyone to hack them,” said the Impact Team.
Another issue that the hackers railed against was how Ashley Madison promised to delete customer data for a fee, and then failed to make good on the promise. If a user wants to obliterate his records in Ashley Madison, he needs to cough up $19 for the service to erase all traces of his activity on the site. The company made more than $1.7 million in 2014 for this service, but, as the hackers argued, ALM only erased data on the publicly viewable parts of the site; for some reason, they still had data on their backend servers. The hackers seem to be seriously pissed about Ashley Madison; Wired.com quoted them, “We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data.” RUINOUS CONSEQUENCES
From large-scale aftermaths to marriage divorces, the fallout from the data dumped by the Impact Team has far-reaching effects.
Because a significant number of Ashley Madison members registered US government emails, various intelligence agencies are combing the documents for anything that can be used to their advantage. Famous personalities – including members of religious organizations – are also facing the consequences of their actions. For those with sensitive posts, voluntary resignation, termination, and even hurdles to future job prospects may be among the effects of this revelation.
Worse, families may be the ones hit the most by the hack. Divorce rates may skyrocket, and children may lose their parents. Already, reports of possible Ashley Madison-related suicides have appeared.
While these effects on families are profound and unquantifiably tragic, the far-reaching effects of the hack do not end there. It affects not only the members of the social media service, but everyone – even those who don’t use the internet often. The Ashley Madison hack is momentous because it’s the first of its kind – the first large scale hack that exposes the secrets of everyday, non-celebrity individuals.
John Herrman of The Awl had astute observations about the hack:
“I’m not sure anyone is really reckoning with how big this could be, yet. If the data becomes as public and available as seems likely right now, we’re talking about tens of millions of people who will be publicly confronted with choices they thought they made in private (or, in some cases, didn’t: Ashley Madison does not validate all email addresses). The result won’t just be getting caught, it will be getting caught in an incredibly visible way that could conceivably follow victims around the internet for years.”
“Understood in more abstract terms, this hack has the potential to alter anyone’s relationship with the devices and apps and services they use every day. Here were millions of people expecting the highest level of privacy that the commercial web could offer as they conducted business they likely wanted to keep between two people. This hack could be ruinous—personally, professionally, financially—for them and their families. But for everyone else, it could haunt every email, private message, text and transaction across an internet where privacy has been taken for granted,” Herrman added.
The implications are staggering. If all our decisions, even those done offline (like credit card transactions, medical histories), or inside our homes (shows we watch, our emails) have no expectations of privacy, how differently will we live our lives? Common wisdom says that who you are behind closed doors is the real you -will a future after the Ashley Madison hack mean the end of our true identities?
Viewed this way, the Ashley Madison hack is not just about infidelity or social scandal. As CNN puts it, 65 million years ago, a massive asteroid smashed into the Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Similarly, the impact of the Ashley Madison hack may be an extinction-level event for privacy. It’s exactly what security and privacy pundits have been warning us for years – perhaps, this time, we’ll listen?
Slate’s Amanda Hess doesn’t think it will change our lives much. “No amount of shame piled onto strangers will make us stop complaining about our co-workers on Gchat, or stop texting photos of our naked bodies to our partners, or stop getting sucked into a taboo online world. These hacks may make us more and more aware of the ways our technology can betray us, but we’re human. We’re perfectly capable of betraying ourselves.”
If Ashley Madison’s announcement that 87,596 women signed up for the service AFTER the hack happened can be trusted, then perhaps, like our mammalian ancestors after the asteroid impact, we’re already adapting to a post-privacy world.
“Life is short… have an affair” – The now notorious infidelity site Ashley Madison used this simple,
albeit incongruous, tagline to entice customers. The hacking of Ashley Madison, however, is far from simple. The act was ruinous
– not just for the members exposed, but for everyone who has
a digital record anywhere. The hack may herald the end of
privacy as we know it.