I’d call the AshleyMadison.com debacle a train wreck, but that’s not enough. It’s like a train carrying a tanker of airborne Ebola virus crashed into a trailer carrying an unstable nuclear warhead.
It’s now apparent that the average paid AshleyMadison.com user spent hundreds of dollars on the service, and some spent thousands. “What are they spending money on, exactly?” Lea asked me. “How should I know?” I replied. Heh. (I can remember someone asking me once what “the average hooker” charged too. Really?)
Well, the Wikipedia article is instructive (and though I haven’t checked the edit history on it, probably newly extensively so). Men have to pay to communicate with women. If a man wants to send a woman a message, that costs money. A woman can send a man a message for free, but the man has to pay to read it. After two members have established contact, further messages between them are free.
Ah, but there are wrinkles—big ones.
It seems 90-95% of the service’s members are men. Also, all of the women aren’t real. AshleyMadison.com routinely uses computer-generated female profiles to make it seem as if more women are on the service than actually are. Gets kind of hard to follow the lies, doesn’t it? How much outrage is appropriate for a customer seeking to be systematically dishonest finding out the organization he sought to do so with is also systematically dishonest?
Well, two Canadian law firms think $576 million of outrage is about right. I wonder what the number will be on the eventual American class action suit?
Happy Monday. I promise I’ll post about something else tomorrow.
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There’s a sucker born every minute, isn’t there?
Major thinkers, we’re dealing with here.