It’s hard to overstate how disruptive the AshleyMadison.com data dump could ultimately be. It’s an event without precedent. The sociology could be fascinating for years.
Despite my longstanding strong feelings about cheating, I have significant concerns about this. Doubtless there are people caught in this who registered, then repaired their marriages and forgot about their AshleyMadison.com accounts. There are others who really were just curious (though not nearly as many as are probably playing that card). Here’s hoping the victims in these sorts of situations find them navigable.
The data dump will certainly hasten the destruction of some marriages that had little hope anyway. But it will also create new rifts that may never have appeared any other way. I hurt for these people and their children.
I’ve encountered a lot of yammering—some of it downright shrill—about how these people didn’t deserve this, privacy should be sacrosanct no matter the circumstances, and so forth. Fine, but at best that’s a secondary point, isn’t it? I wish I saw a similar number of people taking this opportunity to vigorously defend fidelity.
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You know why I’m not worried about this leak from a personal standpoint?
Is this a trick question?
I’m a little worried about potential security threats…(not to sound all cloak and dagger-y). This was discussed during training last week. Let’s say someone who works in a highly sensitive position had been on AshleyMadison. He/she is a great scientist/engineer/astronaut/whatever, but was a wandering spouse. Now that the info is leaked, it’s a potential weapon to be used to gain info from them. “Get us blueprints or we’ll tell your spouse.”
From a personal standpoint…I ain’t got nothin’ on their to be leaked. 🙂
See, I’m skipping all the way to the end on that and saying now that it’s in public domain, the blackmail value of it is diminishing rapidly. The more I think about it, I think that’s the right way to think about it.
There are too many people with too much interest (legitimate, even) in it for secrets to be kept long. Your hypothetical person’s employer could have a look at it, right?
I think if I were someone in the Ashley Madison data dump and I wanted to maximize my chances of saving my marriage, I’d go ahead and confess now. It’s just a time bomb otherwise–one that will go off.
“But it will also create new rifts that may never have appeared any other way.”
Will it? I kinda have to think that if you are on a site like Ashley Madison, unbeknowst to your spouse and they have the inclination/motivation to search for you among the data….that already shows chinks in the marriage (on both sides, to be honest). I find it hard to believe those would never have appeared outside of the data dump. Granted, maybe they would be worked out, but I think they would appear because they were already there. Being on Ashley Madison is a symptom of a problem more so than the problem in and of itself.
Maybe still in the learning-to-trust-again phase after a rough patch, and the AshleyMadison.com account was never explicitly disclosed?
I’m also assuming that if you’re in the data, it’s eventually going to be known somehow. Maybe that’s a bridge too far. I don’t know.