We live in a future where privacy is not only rare, it’s openly mocked. We trust our personal data to corporations either voluntarily or unknowingly, and then we’re surprised when that information isn’t well-guarded or used responsibly. Getting hacked isn’t a good thing, but now it seems like it’s an eventuality.
That’s why almost everyone has reacted in the wrong way to the Ashley Madison hacking. Last week, hackers released information about tens of millions of the site’s customers. Their names, addresses, credit card numbers, email addresses and more are now out there for the world to see. People’s private information is out there for anyone to misuse.
So why are people so gleeful about it?
Facebook and other social media sites lit up last week when hackers released the customer information they claimed to have stolen weeks earlier. The hackers said Ashley Madison was charging customers for a service permanently deleting their personal information and it wasn’t providing that service. They gave Ashley Madison a timeframe to shut down their site permanently, and when their demands weren’t met, they made good on their threat.
“They got what they deserved”
We all saw people spouting off reactions like this. The reasoning here being that because private citizens were part of a site that helps facilitate marital infidelity, they deserved to be hacked. It’s like cheering when the Death Star blows up to these people.
That’s not how things work. Let’s keep in mind that the business is legal, the people who brought their business to the site did nothing illegal. That’s more than certain sections of Craigslist can say. The hacking victims patronized a legal business and expected a reasonable amount of privacy. They expected it because the business advertised it.
Whether the business is moral isn’t relevant here. These people broke no laws that our society has set up, so to say they should be punished goes against what we stand for. Further, people who believe this line of thought seem to think that Ashley Madison was the only source of marital infidelity mankind has ever known, which is like saying people didn’t date until Christian Mingle was invented. There has been infidelity probably as long as marriage has existed. If a person makes the decision to cheat, they generally able to find a way to do so with or without a service. A site that helps people in similar situations is just a business.
Further, you and I don’t get to pick and choose whose data deserves to be leaked and whose doesn’t. It’s hypocritical to support the hacking of Ashley Madison and be outraged when Target, Home Depot or any other business suffers a data breach.
Remember the Fappening? Hundreds of nude celebrity iPhone photo collections were hacked and posted online, most notably, Jennifer Lawrence. Some had the backward logic that the victims were to blame, because if they didn’t want to be hacked, they should have never taken those pictures in the first place. Because we’re not supposed to use our phones how we want to in private communication with other people, but it’s OK for you to make us look at your kid on Facebook every damn day. Victim blaming is popular when it’s about sex.
“I found my neighbor in the leaked data”
If you’re searching for your spouse in the list of customers, that’s fine, and you probably have bigger marital problems regardless of what you find. A lot of people have searched for neighbor’s addresses since the Ashley Madison data was leaked. They enjoy snooping into other people’s lives. That makes them part of the problem.
Say some clever person had made the leaked Target data more searchable and readily available on sites not in the Deep Web. Would it be acceptable for you and your friends to go searching through the records to see if any victims are near you? Wouldn’t you feel a little creepy about looking at their credit card info and purchase history? It’s hypocritical to search through one and not the other. The correct answer here is that neither is OK, because it hurts the victims even worse.
Except for Josh Duggar, because screw that guy. You don’t get to make yourself a public figure by espousing the sanctity of marriage, even taking a job campaigning against gay marriage, and then solicit affairs online. And that’s leaving out all the other creepy stuff he’s done.
So who should we be mad at?
That group we haven’t talked about in a while: the hackers. These people, likely at least one disgruntled employee, held a company for ransom. Their supposed moral high ground was exposing that Ashley Madison’s customers weren’t getting the data-deleting service they paid for. They’re not wrong about that part. But then they demanded that the site be shut down. They broke into a company’s servers, stole data, and held the victims hostage. This hacking actually killed two people.
Now imagine that the company is Target. Hackers are threatening to release customer data unless Target shuts down in a month. That’s not OK, is it? So why would it be fine for hackers to threaten any other legitimate company? By cheering on the hackers, you make illegal actions OK.
You should also be mad at the people at Ashley Madison to a lesser degree. Any company that charges for services they don’t provide shouldn’t exist. (Looking at you, Comcast.) They were lazy, and abused the trust of their customers. The site is certainly done for now. And if this was going to be the outcome either way, it probably would have made more sense to just shut down the site and rebrand. At least you’d save customer data.
And be mad at Josh Duggar and his cult of a family.