THE slogan of Ashley Madison, a website that arranges extramarital liaisons, is “Life is short. Have an affair.” Its home page shows a woman holding a finger to her lips. So much for promising to keep secrets. Last month a group of hackers called Impact Team stole the site’s user database and transaction history going back to 2007, and this week they released it online: more than 30m users’ names, addresses and personal details, along with GPS co-ordinates and sexual preferences. This trove of data is fiddly to download and search, but already users of the site are being outed, as journalists and activists comb through the records looking for celebrities, business leaders and politicians. A deluge of revelations seems likely in the coming days, as websites pop up that allow easy searching.
The hackers’ motives are unclear. In their statements they denounce the “fraud, deceit and stupidity” of both Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, and the site’s users. Their complaint against Avid Life is supposedly that the site is a scam, because the vast majority of its users are men, who have to buy credits to access its services. But...
from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1E73gRL
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