Lately, I’ve been getting a fair amount of email from people who’ve been browsing the stolen Ashley Madison subscriber list, telling me what famous or semi-famous person had an account there. I haven’t been impressed. A lot of it seems to be men who were looking for dates, and the thing is…I really doubt that any of them found anything approximating love or sex there. It’s peculiar to accuse people of cheating on their spouses through Ashley Madison, when it’s highly unlikely that any man was making contact with any women there.
A detailed look at the Ashley Madison database reveals…
What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.
Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.
31 million men begging 12,000 women for dates. That’s just pathetic. And it gets worse.
The first field, called mail_last_time, contained a timestamp indicating the last time a member checked the messages in their Ashley Madison inbox. If a person never checked their inbox, the field was blank. But even if they’d checked their messages only once, the field contained a date and time. About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1492 women had ever checked their messages. It was a serious anomaly.
The pattern was reflected in another data field, too. This one, called chat_last_time contained the timestamp for the last time a member had struck up a conversation using the Ashley Madison chat system. Roughly 11 million men had engaged in chat, but only 2400 women had.
The hackers of the Impact Team who broke into the database were right about one thing, for sure: Ashley Madison was a colossal scam that took advantage of men. But then releasing all that membership data was simply another strike against the victims of the scam. Some of them may have been salacious hypocrites (see Josh Duggar), but that’s not a crime…and many of those victims might have just been lonely single people, fumbling futilely on the internet.
I think internet dating is broken. Too many women scared off by creepy guys. Too many bots trying to entice you to their webcam shows, or blatant rip off dating sites.
I’m not surprised by this at all. In one of my first programming jobs (I’m a software developer), I had a co-worker who did some freelance work for a now defunct online dating site. He’d explain all of the ethically dubious things they’d do to string paying men along and keep their subscriptions active and the dollars rolling in. I guess it didn’t work for too long though since the site doesn’t exist anymore.
For example, they too had a huge bank of fake female bot accounts rated by “hotness” and had automated scripts to send inactive male accounts messages from these bots, but to avoid suspicion, they’d attempt not to have the female bot account be too “hot” and out of the
sucker’smale’s league, and they never sent messages too frequently. The bots would also send time-delayed replies when messaged by a real user, but sometimes not – also in an attempt to avoid suspicion.The whole endeavor was extremely shady.
The AI problem of approximating a real woman online on a dating site would be really fun to work on … except for the ethical issues.
So of course that raises the question — where do the actual women go?
I suppose it’s possible…perhaps even likely…that a percentage of the 31 million men are sock puppets. If they were using fake women to attract men, they would probably use fake men to convince the real men that the opportunities are genuine.
at first, it is easy to laugh at the “cheater’s website” being hacked to expose all the guys that wanted to cheat on their wives.
then one has to consider that never every marriage is the perfect bonding of two individuals that can get along over every issue. perhaps this site was the less romantic version of eHarmony, where people are just looking for a friend to talk to (without the stigma of actual therapy). There is also the physical contact aspect, where sometimes it just nice to cuddle without expectations of extras. Married couples sometimes feel obligated to “finish” a cuddle with something a little more …
I can see that this site may provide such an outlet, where everyone else will call it “cheating”.
To then publish a list of everyone who was exploring this site is quite uncalled for. Such a site would be vulnerable to exploitation by creeps who want to use it to expand their trophylist (aka PUAs), if the hackers could discern who the PUAs of the member list were, only then could such a published list, of the PUAs only, have any value (assuming the hackers had the psychic ability to identify the PUAs). Otherwise, such a list could be used for cross-purposes (as we’ve elsewhere been informed).
re OP:
agreed AshlyMadison world is sad and lonely.
@slithey tove #6
I really wish more people were reacting to the AM hack and leak with this kind of nuance, instead of a lot of the gleeful self-rightousness that’s been going on in the last few weeks.
I’m single, so I really don’t have any personal experience to offer, but I’m certainly not in favor of a black and white view of the sanctity of marriage. I’ve known a lot of married couples; many of them seem happy, some not so much, and a few have separated or divorced. It’s not for me to judge, or even any of my business, why a couple’s marriage is the way it is, much less how it “should” be simply because I haven’t acted the same way. The push from those who are trying to all but chisel marriage vows into granite certainly doesn’t help if, for whatever reason, someone becomes unhappy in their marriage but feels the absolute worst thing to do is end it.
And yes, I would even extend this basic courtesy to Josh Duggar. Him and his enormous family’s work towards mandating who can and cannot be married, and even the various relationship rules they think others should follow, is definitely infuriating. But it’s not an excuse to turn into some kind of Moral Majority of the left because social conservatives are, unsurprisingly, not that different with regards to monogamy and/or fidelity than social progressives. He’s a hypocrite in his own words and was revealed to be just as human as the rest of us, so he can sort if out for himself, maybe even learning it’s not his business to butt into others’ private lives (or maybe not).
I’ll let Glenn Greenwald phrase it better than I can, as he did last week: “We love to think of ourselves as so progressive and advanced, yet so often leap at the opportunity to intervene and wallow around in, and sternly pass judgment on, the private sexual choices of other adults.”
Godbots never learn, as Jebus forgives their sins.
Where do the actual women go?
Generally, we mind our own business and get interrupted while reading a fascinating book on the bus.
That’s kind of an irritated answer. Honestly I’d never ever use a dating site, and I might have the most hostile OKCupid account anyone ever saw, created back in the days of silly internet quizzes, which is how they got so many women on the site.
I remember being a teenager crying over some guy breaking up with me and an adult male friend said, “go ahead and cry, but i’ll tell you the truth: He is only a man, and can be replaced.” I was pretty young and I had NO IDEA how true what he said was. I grew up thinking that it was *hard* to meet men and that you had to hold on to the first one who paid you any attention. If I could tell 16 year old me anything, it would be what utter crap that is. There are tons of people looking to meet somebody new every day. Hell, every hour. you can be choosy.
I prefer to meet people who share my interests and values, so I participate online in places that reflect those values and interests. I make friends. after a period that is almost always measured in months, I’m romantically interested. I think my process is extremely slow! I haven’t really asked, being comfortable in a relationship for five years (that was a friendship of three years when it changed.)
So where are the women? all around you, I bet, but they don’t like being treated as prey.
Yeah. Sounds like a loser site. Contrast this with a free one I popped into out of curiosity, only to be *instantly* hit with a chat window, which I couldn’t figure out how to turn off, with *gasp* an actual woman on the other end of the connection. lol
That site was one of a ton of, “Pop in to find someone to bang.”, places, which literally don’t care who, why, or what you want to do so with, never mind whether or not you are “swinging” (or cheating, which I know enough about the former to know they are not exactly the same thing, and.. singles do not get invited, from my understanding of the matter, precisely because they are not the same thing).
Figures that some big name, absurd, site, dedicated to, “Getting it on with someone who you are not married to.”, instead of the more straight forward, “Just get it on.”, would be a mix of sausage fest + no actual women. Wow…
Just as gender isn’t a black and white boy/girl field, concepts of monagamy and polyamory should be expected to vary from individual to individual. The people squeeing with glee at evil adulterers being exposed have been brainwashed by artificial religious pretense at adult relationships. Teen magazines glorify the grotesquely unlikely ideal of the perfect “soulmate”. Men and women live their lives in a pathetic tedium of a broken relationship because they don’t want to ruin the expectations of parents, pastors or children. Until the human race grows the hell up and unlearns the unhealthy and fake relationship schemes, sites like Aliasleak Madison are going to scam anyone with hormones and a credit card and too many people are going to lead miserable lives. Monagamous marriage works for some, open marriages for others, endless dating for yet another. It’s the third party observer that has to get over their child-like expectations of the people in the relationships and realize that they may not, nor do they have to conform to any of these expectations.
@ceesays #9 – “So where are the women? all around you, I bet, but they don’t like being treated as prey.” – QFT, though I do feel a bit awkward about the “He is only a man, and can be replaced” part. My wife can never be replaced, and I sincerely hope – and have every reason to believe – she feels the same about me.
Hmm… Going off on a tangent regarding secret relationships, Ed Brayton shows how the federal government feels the need to police what people do in their bedrooms:
”Government Scores Another Victory in the War on Orgasms” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/08/26/government-scores-another-victory-in-the-war-on-orgasms/
The Department of Homeland Security makes a really important bust! Never mind those silly “terrorists”.
In comment threads about this elsewhere, I’ve been frustrated by how many people take a very binary view of culpability. The public disclosure of the database will have hurt innocent people (I’m thinking mainly of partners and kids of people in the database, and the public humiliation they face). I believe that the hackers acted with callous disregard for the hurt their actions might cause to those innocent third parties, and (if they wanted to shine a light on Ashley Madison’s business practices) should have found a way to do so which minimised the splash damage. But a lot of people rubbish that idea, and say that the hackers have no such responsibility. It’s as if they think of blame as a kind of baton, which can be passed around but which can be held by only one actor at a time. According to this view, as soon as someone signed up at Ashley Madison, they became 100% responsible for any harm caused in future, and both the hackers and Ashley Madison were blameless. It’s a strange kind of morality.
This. People cheat for a reason, and that reason is very rarely simple selfish horniness. If they feel the need to cheat, then chances are their marriage is lacking something they need.
I can’t deny a certain level of shadenfreude at the self-righteous Duggar being caught violating the sanctity of marriage that he claims to be defending with his anti-gay rhetoric, but there are a bunch of other people who will be shamed and shunned who don’t really deserve it. Yes, assuming they’ve entered into their marriage with an expectation of monogamy, then cheating is immoral and they really ought to be dealing with whatever marital problems they face in a healthier manner, but it’s not as black and white a wrong as most people make it out to be. And of course there may very well be people on there who are in open marriages or are swingers, who haven’t even done anything wrong.
And as pointed out in an article PZ posted the other day (something I hadn’t previously thought of) a lot of AM’s customers are from countries where adultery is illegal who may now face punishment, and some of them are gay men who come from countries where homosexuality is illegal who can now be identified by their government. Hell, it doesn’t even need to be outright illegal; if they’re from some less-enlightened country where some vigilante may take it upon themselves to identify people on the list. These people may be in serious danger.
rietpluim, 12 – It’s a rather stark phrase, isn’t it? I think he phrased it that way specifically to jolt me a bit, and it worked. I don’t think it would have worked if it hadn’t come from him – he was a volunteer who helped us with our high school campus radio project, and I pretty much hero worshipped him as an Elder Goth who managed to treat me like I was growing up cool and absolutely did not want to date me. The guy I’d been dating was a *jerk,* but I was blaming the whole thing on me not being good enough and my life was over.
McC2lhu is rarer than fish with knees, 11 – If you knew how many times I have encountered some dude claiming polyamory who got mad and called me a bitch when I said, “oh that’s cool. When can I meet your partner?” This problem is widespread. there are a lot of skeevy dudes lying about what kind of a relationship they’re in – so many that I roll my eyes when I hear someone claim poly while trying to pick me up, and I are one!
Maybe a lot of heterosexual men who joined Ashley Madison are sad and lonely, but that’s not the complete picture. Via Shakesville there’s this bit of information:
So how are the AM hackers going to justify it when people like the man in the above quote are found out and imprisoned, tortured and/or killed? They might perceive homosexuality as a sin as well, and in that case they have scored doubly.
The linked Shakesville article is also a good read when you feel that people have gotten their just desserts. Read it and think again.
“But only 1492 women had ever checked their messages”
Christopher Columbus!!!!
I’ve been horrified at the number of people I’ve seen who are gleefully saying “those dirty cheaters got what they deserved.” It baffles me that you can think “oh that person did something I think is immoral so it’s totally okay for someone to steal their identity and make them victims of a crime!” without realizing this is the exact same reasoning behind jailing gay people or outing women for having abortions. “That person is doing something I think is immoral so any bad thing that happens to them is totally okay and they deserve it!”
Last time I checked there was a difference between immoral and illegal and it wasn’t okay for random hackers to punish people for immorality.
Personally, I do not believe these numbers. I’m surprised that everyone looking at the data is presuming it’s unadulterated (pardon the pun). The hackers were interested in harming Ashley Madison. How easy would it have been to simply cull a large population of women to create a false impression? Or to scrub the “last login” data? I find it hard to believe that the site was as successful as it was if it didn’t deliver real affairs. I think we’re being trolled.
There have been reported suicides over this, and many divorces are surely pending. Families have been destroyed. The story here should be that the hackers have misdirected their ire and harmed harmless people, not how sad and pathetic these customers were.
I had a discussion with a close friend about non-monogamy. I am polyamorous and in a quad. However, my friend is more in a swinging type of situation. His wife knows he is seeing other women and accepts that. She knows who most are, but not all. I think there is an uneasy balance of information they share about this.
But anyway, he used AM and met with 5 or 6 women from it. He had his profile up for about 2 weeks. Of the women he met, one was single and the rest married. Of the married ones, I think only one was true cheating where the husband had no idea. So from his description, people tend to activate their account when they are looking for more partners and turn it off when they like where they are at.
So this is just one anecdotal story. But it may be that they are badly analyzing the data if they don’t know how people are using the site.
Jim Etchison @19:
So someone
And you doubt the findings because…reasons?
The data they downloaded was the data provided by the hackers. They are biased, unscrupulous people. You would have to prove that the data was unscrubbed for me to believe that 31 million men were begging 12,000 women for dates. That’s a 2583:1 ratio. Marketing that lopsided is an incredible claim that requires incredible evidence. Data provided by these hackers is not compelling enough evidence to believe the findings.
*wince*
I wish people wouldn’t use term like “sad” and “pathetic” to describe the hopelessly single. It’s bad enough that we’re sexually undesirable, but do you have to rub it in?
Yeah, saw that raid thing. And its telling the language used. As the article quotes Scott Shackford as saying, “There is absolutely no pretense of pretending there are any “victims” here. Nobody is charged with “trafficking.” There is absolutely nothing in the complaint that even hints at the idea that there is anything nonconsensual happening, that so much as a single human being is harmed…”
Only.. Yeah, it is trafficking. As of the passage of the so called JFVM or what ever it was called, by congress (which is “Justice for Victims”, supposedly), the law expands the definition of trafficking **specifically** when sex is involved (and ignores all other forms of trafficking, which the prior laws where **supposed to be** addressing), to include “harboring, recruiting, or transporting, regardless of whether or not coercion was used, or harm was caused”. Harboring, as a woman named Batts found out, when nailed under the Alaska version of this idiocy, means, “Anything the state wants it to be.”, whether that be actually housing someone, to providing them with an online service/communication network, to contact each other, or clients. In the case of Batts as well, not one single person came forward to claim she was doing anything evil, or even vaguely dislikable, but she got 5 years house arrest, and 12 month probation – and that was **before** the new federal law went into effect. Who knows what the F the penalty is under federal jurisdiction.
Its more of the asinine “Nordic Model” BS – end prostitution, while ignoring all other trafficking, by going after their means of communication, and those who hire them, but not the actual sex workers, who are “victims!” The fact that they may be doing it to pay their rent, and the same assholes that pass these laws are trying to dismantle safety nets, and will immediately start ranting about the now jobless sex workers being too lazy to work, welfare queens (or kings?), etc., as they lose their homes, and, in some cases their kids, only to land on the street, as homeless… is just the cherry on the top of the shit cake.
They are bound and determined, now that they have a new “war” to fight, to win it. You know, the same way they did with the drug war, or Iraq, or…
You remember that cartoon, from way back, with the three idiots, staring at a candle, one going, “What is it?”, the next, “I don’t know.”, and the third, “Hit it with your Bible!”? The sane people in this country are the poor saps standing behind a whole crowd of these morons, barely able to see the flicker, and desperately yelling, “Leave the damn thing alone!!!”
It turns out there were no women on the site because women couldn’t care less about sex, as proven by their lack of registration on one (expensive) paid website. This, along with various other anec-data provided by the author, scientifically demonstrates that women never have sex for fun, as (being the monolithic group vagina-people are) they’re always angling for relationships. Once they’ve snagged a man, you couldn’t pay them to get back in the dating scene! They’re way too focused on…nurturing or some shit…to care for a roll in the hay. *eyeroll* http://nypost.com/2015/08/22/ashley-madison-proves-women-arent-interested-in-casual-sex/
Am curious if the men who thought they were talking to women on Ashley Madison also thought they were lonely women waiting to talk to them for merely $1 dollar a minute?
Akira @ 24
Word.
carbonfox @ 26
and i’ll just quote part of the URL since it sums it up so well
Or you know, that site wasn’t a space which appealed to more women who were looking for something. From the ads i’d seen prior to the event, i can possibly imagine why. But i don’t think the post here or gizmodo (or other places i also read) are implying that women… just like their kitchens or whatever. The NYP article, if one may call it such, certainly is a bunch of stereotypically tropey dreck. (And there are plenty more really bad bits on this all over, to be sure.)