Yes, cheaters have a right to privacy

The intertubes are alight with articles on the Ashley Madison hacking and two data dumps of the member database. While some of the messaging I’ve seen has been nuanced there’s a good chance it will be dwarfed by hype and clickbait so some thoughts and links about it.

The reaction that concerns me the most is a willingness by the public to accept or even applaud this as some sort of “karma” because the people hurt are “dirty cheaters”. The lesson the public may be learning is that if you personally disapprove of someone it’s ok to invade their privacy and make them suffer significant consequences. Of which there are many.

The most serious aspect is a safety issue. The worst part of it is that some AM users now fear for their lives because they live in countries where adultery, same sex encounters or the specific fantasies they have ticked are illegal and punishable by imprisonment, torture or death. Although it hasn’t been confirmed by mainstream news (and will it?), Saudi Arabia may already be combing through the data seeking people to arrest. There is also the risk of suicide for a proportion of the users. Harassers such as GamerGate are already cross-linking the database with their targets to help step up their harassment.

Onto AM’s member base. Although AM markets itself as a website for affairs, it asks users to select from one of the following:

1. Attached Male seeking Females
2. Attached Female seeking Males
3. Single Male seeking Females
4. Single Female seeking Males
5. Male seeking Males
6. Female seeking Females

There will also be people simply looking for hookups in AM’s database.

There will be people who are pretending to be attached for whatever reasons. I guess like the cliched single hetero man who slips on a wedding ring thinking this will increase his chances.

There will be non-monogamous people using the website with their partners’ consent. Largely because of the stigma attached to non-monogamy and the anonymity AM was supposed to provide would be some barrier against these people losing families, jobs, custody of children etc if they were “found out”.

There will be people using AM who cannot date openly. For example, countries where they are not expected to date at all.

It’s also important to remember that even in monogamous relationships, not all secret extra-marital affairs are unethical. Not all relationships are equal. There are abusive relationships, where I hope readers don’t think the victim owes their abuser some monogamous loyalty. Abuse is not an either-or but a scale. As Dan Savage aptly quotes here, “the victim of an affair is not always the victim of the marriage.”

There will be people who wanted to cheat but hadn’t actually done it. Which is probably a lot since the AM business model essentially is a scam.

Then there are remaining people who you may consider “dirty cheaters”: those in monogamous, equitable relationships who wanted to break the rules of the relationship and did. Even when they’re hypocritical “family values” pieces of shit like Josh Duggar they still deserve privacy and the glee with which some people have reacted to their exposure is disturbing. It’s not just about the information that they had an AM account, it’s the specific kinks they’ve added to their profile that are now the topic of discussion. Somewhere out there, someone thinks what you’re doing is also horribly immoral.

There have been many data visualisations (eg. top cheating suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne). While a bit disturbing I guess it’s not as much of the problem since it’s anonymised data. More damaging are the services that let you look up individual email addresses, or even your entire Gmail address book. People won’t be able to help themselves which is why I think the creators of such services would be partially responsible for any actual lives lost.

Lousy Canuck also has a useful take that “it’s interesting that this might be the first time where MEN are being targeted generally for revenge for sexual indiscretions, and that these indiscretions are actually far more indiscrete than taking nude selfies to share with consenting adults”.

The hackers’ purported motive is to bring down AM because they believe their business model is a scam, they scam their customers (by charging a $19 deletion fee which is not foolproof deletion) and because they allege it’s used by human traffickers. It’s this high-minded talk that’s also pretty offensive. They’re “rescuing” people from AM’s deceptive practices by in some cases ruining lives. The claim that AM is at fault because they didn’t shut down as per the demands is particularly reminiscent of abuser behaviour. But what gets me the most is that they’re congratulating themselves on being some crusaders for justice, all the while being oblivious or worse about the effects of their actions on the most marginalised members. (It’s about ethics in cheating website journalism.)

It’s a very white-cishet-male-Libertarian thing to do.

[Thanks to Marija for some helpful insights for the above.]