Ashley Madison and me

I have been very interested in this whole Ashley Madison thing.

If you aren't familiar, it is a site that people use to set up affairs, so married people can cheat discreetly. At least, that seems to be the specialty. I don't think you have to be married to use it. Their data was hacked and being released.

Initially I had never heard of the site, and I didn't think a lot about it except that it was unfortunately that we had just named our new kitten Ashley.

Then I saw some people tweeting about how this could be very dangerous for the users. Some of them could be in abusive relationships, some might be in open marriages where it wasn't anyone's business, and while in my head there are probably still better ways to deal with it, yes, there can be some pretty difficult experiences out there, and it's not my job to judge. I heard that there have been at least two suicides related to the breach, and that may not even be the cheaters - some people finding out that they have been betrayed will feel a lot of pain from that. 

None of that is to justify adultery, but the initial thing you picture when you hear about it is overly simplified, and so while many people's first response was to think this was funny, it wasn't.

There was some food for thought there, but it was other stories that fascinated me. For example, apparently Ashley Madison was trying to get the breached material that was posted online taken down using copyright law. I learned that in an article explaining why that would not work under copyright law, and that article was very well-written and informative about copyright law.

The side note from that and other articles is that apparently part of the problem is that Ashley Madison had been paid money to delete certain information and not done so, making them derelict in customer service, and probably not really on the ball in terms of basic privacy protection which is a notable failing in any service using "discreet" as a key word. There is a level on which I find myself not terribly surprised about a site set up for this purpose not behaving completely ethically and responsibly.

Now the next interesting thing may counteract the final interesting thing, but it probably doesn't all the way. Anyway, it turns out that a lot of the female profiles were fake. A lot of men thought they were talking to women, but were really talking to other men.

Whether this means that it was rare for people to progress all the way to meeting up, I don't know. Even partially pursuing the intent to cheat can cause relationship harm, so this may be bad enough. However, it is worth remembering that not everyone is who they say they are, especially online.

Last but not least is user data, some of which may be invalid. Apparently in terms of famous names that have shown up, Josh Duggar has really admitted to using it. Of course, having already admitted to molesting his sisters and a baby sitter, we may be less surprised by depravity on his part, but Christian vlogger Sam Rader also admitted to it. It's enough to make you wonder about this article:

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/slices/expert-400-church-leaders-will-resign-sunday-because-names-surfaced-ashley-madison-hack

So, when you rank the states paying for Ashley Madison, and the state paying the 8th most is Utah, well, some of those accounts could be fake, but the paid accounts might be less likely to be fake, and we have to consider it at least possible that there are many Utah users, and many of them are LDS and active.

If you recall, before I got distracted by the mega-quake article I was writing about chastity and modesty. If it was not obvious, I have decided to wait to write more on the earthquake until after Unprepared airs October 1st, so this gives us some time to talk about sex. Religious people can get weird about it, and it does not make us more righteous. It can even make it harder for us to remain righteous.

The September posts are going to try and break that down.