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Privacy sacred, even for the unscrupulous

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It's very hard to resist schadenfreude -- taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune -- isn't it?

The image on Ashley Madison's website shows a woman with her finger to her lips. She's game to keep a secret. Her eyes are hidden, anonymous, exactly what some 37 million extramarital affair-seekers might not be for long, after hackers targeted the website's customer database.

A lot of us have spent the week letting that number sink in: 37 million. That's more than 10 per cent of the population of Canada and the U.S. combined. If Ashley Madison's records are accurate, one in 10 people use its services.

A second website, Established Men, also was targeted. By the most generous assessment -- its own -- it's an "online dating site that matches rich men with seriously hot women." The homepage features a man's hand scrolling through profiles of young women in various stages of wardrobe malfunction.

The hackers (or hacker) calling themselves the Impact Team could not have picked a less sympathetic group of victims. If the targets were cellphone subscribers or Home Depot shoppers, we'd be calling this an act of cyber-terrorism. But few voices seem keen to champion this cause.

The population now seems divided like the circles of a dartboard: cheating spouses standing nervously on the bullseye, ringed by the sanctimonious, anticipating their comeuppance; divorce and class-action attorneys circling the periphery; and spectators hanging back, waiting for the darts to fly.

And what poisonous darts they are. The Impact Team threatened to reveal the sexual predilections of clients, along with nude photos, real names and credit card information, unless parent company Avid Life Media takes down the two web properties "immediately (and) permanently," according to a manifesto captured in a screenshot by Krebs on Security.

Nobody appears to be losing much sleep over the suffering of this clientele, leaving Ashley Madison founder Noel Biderman alone, bleating, "Like us or not, this is still a criminal act."

Biderman's company doesn't just facilitate cheating, but actively promotes it with the slogan "Life is short. Have an affair."

And while it's fair to say people who visit the website probably don't need much encouragement, the company promotes its message widely, with billboards, radio and TV commercials that have outraged advertising standards boards far and wide.

The hackers' main concern, however, appears not to be the morality of the service, but its illusion of privacy. The manifesto claims the company retained customer and credit card information despite collecting $1.7 million last year from a paid service to delete those very records. Following the hack, Ashley Madison waived its $19 charge for a "full delete," but it's not clear newly deleted accounts will be any more secure than the millions already compromised.

For all its concern about privacy, the Impact Team had few qualms about violating that of subscribers, proclaiming: "They're cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion." The irony is thick: Ashley Madison could be responsible for ruined marriages not because it runs a business devoted to facilitating adultery, but because it hasn't run it well enough.

Tempting as it may be to relish the plight of cheaters squirming in their seats, schadenfreude is not our friend. It dulls us to a blunt criminal incursion on privacy and erodes our expectation corporations -- or, by extension, governments -- have a duty to protect personal data. It buys into a dangerous notion: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." We should fear these words above all.

write.robin@baranyai.ca

 

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