We like to see people get their comeuppance, and with the Ashley Madison hack that feeling that justice is somehow being served has been multiplied monumentally. We may not know the people behind the data leaks, but we know that they have engaged in infidelity, and that therefore makes them awful people who deserve to have their personal information leaked onto the Internet. That is what those in support of the monumental hack have been telling themselves, but morality isn’t black and white, meaning that supporting the actions of these cyber criminals is dubious at best, abhorrent at worst.
Yes, it is difficult to feel sympathy for those who have been engaging in extra-marital affairs, but not all of the men swept up in this controversy will be in a relationship as cut and dry as “sleazy married man looks for sex with other women behind his wife’s back.” And even if they are all like that, why is it necessary for their personal information to be in the public domain?
Here are 3 inherent problems with supporting the Ashley Madison hack that those doing so should consider:
1. The hypocrisy of the outrage.
So we all rightly dog-piled on Gawker when they outed Condé Nast Publications’ David Geithner and successfully helped a male escort blackmail him, yet they’re now running a story informing us that former conservative reality TV star Josh Duggar was among those named in the Ashley Madison hack, and that’s okay?
Allow me to run through the list of similarities between those events, that have both attracted thoroughly disparate responses:
- Gawker obtained this information through third-party sources, with them not having obtained it through the Geithner or Duggar themselves. Just because it was one individual submitting the information to Gawker in the Geither case does not make it any different to them obtaining it via hackers in the Duggar case.
- Neither story is in the interest of the general public. Geither is a businessman, whereas Duggar was a former reality TV star who went on to become the executive director of the American conservative Christian group the Family Research Council, before resigning in May 2015 after molestation charges were leveled against him. While it is being reported that Duggar had the Ashley Madison account during his time with the FRC, given that he is no longer a part of the group, of what interest is this to anyone outside of his family?
- Both stories go into unnecessary, salacious detail. While it is difficult to justify the mere existence of both the Duggar and Geithner stories, Gawker also went into an unjustifiable amount of detail, with the Duggar article revealing his alleged sexual desires, too. Why is this needed?
It is far easier to become vehement about the publishing of the Geithner story than it is Duggar’s given the latter’s history, but we cannot pretend that an individual’s personal life is somehow newsworthy just because we dislike them and their actions. The consensual sexual relationships of men should not be classified as news.
2. No relationship is the same.
When you think of individuals who would purposefully sign up to a dating website specifically catered to people who wish to have an affair, it is likely that your opinion of those individuals wouldn’t be very high. It inevitably conjures up images of sleazeballs who mistreat their partners, but no relationship is the same and should therefore not be treated as such.
There have reportedly been 32 million individuals implicated in the Ashley Madison hack, and to assume that each of them are going to fit the Don Draper bill is naive to say the least. There are a myriad of different possibilities regarding the potential intentions of those whose details have been posted – what if a married couple share an open relationship, for instance, but wish to be discreet and so therefore see Ashley Madison as an ideal way of having extra-marital sex without the hassle they could face if they frequented more traditional dating websites?
And what if these married couples have kids, and now the details of their affairs have been published online for their potential friends and family to see, turning their relationship into a public affair while they children stand by and watch? Or what if the married individual who signed up to Ashley Madison admitted that they had done so and had apologized and been forgiven, only for others now being able to seek out their account and force the couple to retread bad memories? And what about the possibility that an individual has signed up for an account with the website using a different person’s name and email address, with them now having effectively framed someone else?
3. Credit card and personal information was leaked.
If you still choose to overlook the ethical problem that the Ashley Madison leak proposes, then it should also be noted that to condone the hackers’ actions is to also condone the leaking of vast amounts of personal information and credit card details. This little issue stretches beyond your own moral standpoint on the matter and into the realm of “this was definitely not an okay thing to do as it is very, very illegal.”
There is no justifiable reason for the credit card details of Ashley Madison’s visitors to be leaked onto the web, regardless of whether or not you believe that their infidelity deserves a little monetary punishment in the form of someone being able to run riot with their bank information. Saying these people deserve to be outed due to their cheating is one thing, but to suggest that their credit card information belongs on the web for strangers to access is another. There is no logical train of thought between “this husband cheated on his wife” to “this husband cheated on his wife therefore some schmuck from Delaware should be able to take out a loan using his bank account,” and anyone who attempts to justify that being the case isn’t clutching at straws so much as they are holding onto those straws for dear life as they slip through their sweaty palms.
