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It's None of Your Business
Aug. 20th, 2015 03:28 pmHackers exposed the user information from 37 million Ashely Madison/Established Men users. The former is the well-known cheat-on-your-spouse site, the latter, a site for rich men looking for young women. Both are pretty creepy.
I was briefly tempted to download the leaked data and see what I could find (searching for friends/relatives/coworkers basically) but changed my mind temporarily when I discovered the compressed data was almost 10GB in size. If I'm going to clobber my bandwidth, it's going to be for something worthwhile, like season 3 of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (I didn't download it - it fell off the back of a truck - honest).
My resolve became permanent when it occurred to me that this was like those leaked celebrity photos of Jennifer Lawrence et al. It was none of my business. If they want me, personally, to see their nude body, then they can let me know, or take a role involving nudity. And private pictures meant for someone else, just don't cut it.
Similarly, I have zero business looking at the Ashley Madison data. Why? Because it's a cheating website and I do not have a partner. If I were in a relationship where there was an expectation of monogamy, and I suspected my partner of cheating, then I have cause to look at that data - and even then, I should only look for them.
As Amanda Marcotte points out, cheating on your spouse does not violate the social contract, only a personal one.
There was a point where I found the whole Josh Duggar thing funny. It stopped being funny when I read this. A lot of people in less savory areas of the world (and let's be honest, here in the civilized west too) are now at severe risk, because of the hackers who stole this information. That risk goes beyond destroyed relationships and could include lost jobs, social ostracism, and death. You're a gay man in Saudi Arabia and you've been outed? Get the hell out of there if you can, is my advice. I can't imagine the religious police taking "it's none of your business" to heart. Religious Police is basically claiming the role of busybody and combining it with coercive violence. If you know anyone who makes the claim that that's a good thing, it's time to stop having anything to do with them.
One thing I've learned over the years is that lots of people cheat. While this may be a bad act, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are bad people - a distinction that took a long time to grok. Doesn't mean the victim needs to be sympathetic to them (I certainly wouldn't be, if I were the victim), but sometimes us innocent bystanders should be. Or if not forgiving, at least not willing to join in on the dog-pile. A simple "Yeah, maybe you should have split up before that, if things were so bad. Anyway, it's not my problem, so let's move on" should do, if it needs comment at all. In the end, what does going after a third-party cheater gain you? Nothing.
This whole situation is one in which there are no good guys, but we can unambiguously define a bad guy. Not Ashley Madison; though conceiving of, building, and maintaining such a project points to systemic sociopathy. Not the cheaters; while a lot of them are assholes, there's enough (like those gay, traveling, Saudis) that aren't that you should not indulge the dog-piling urge. It's the hackers. They tried to destroy a legal (if congenitally icky) company, thus imposing their questionable morals on others. In this I think they have little difference from the religious police. They're just gutless enough not to swing the truncheons themselves. Remember, they opted to release confidential information about random strangers to punish a company. And then they had the gall to claim it was Ashley Madison's fault that they had to release the data, as if they weren't independent moral actors. That like a bad trope that always makes me rage when I see it in fiction. "You forced me to shoot your wife when you didn't hand over your wallet. Her death is on you." No asshole, I think I can firmly put the blame on a murderous mugger. And bad a company as Ashely Madison is, and as bad as their policy to "delete" information was (not) implemented, I can definitely blame you guys for leaking it. Heads will literally roll over this. I hope someday you'll realize that you're to blame.
I was briefly tempted to download the leaked data and see what I could find (searching for friends/relatives/coworkers basically) but changed my mind temporarily when I discovered the compressed data was almost 10GB in size. If I'm going to clobber my bandwidth, it's going to be for something worthwhile, like season 3 of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (I didn't download it - it fell off the back of a truck - honest).
My resolve became permanent when it occurred to me that this was like those leaked celebrity photos of Jennifer Lawrence et al. It was none of my business. If they want me, personally, to see their nude body, then they can let me know, or take a role involving nudity. And private pictures meant for someone else, just don't cut it.
Similarly, I have zero business looking at the Ashley Madison data. Why? Because it's a cheating website and I do not have a partner. If I were in a relationship where there was an expectation of monogamy, and I suspected my partner of cheating, then I have cause to look at that data - and even then, I should only look for them.
As Amanda Marcotte points out, cheating on your spouse does not violate the social contract, only a personal one.
There was a point where I found the whole Josh Duggar thing funny. It stopped being funny when I read this. A lot of people in less savory areas of the world (and let's be honest, here in the civilized west too) are now at severe risk, because of the hackers who stole this information. That risk goes beyond destroyed relationships and could include lost jobs, social ostracism, and death. You're a gay man in Saudi Arabia and you've been outed? Get the hell out of there if you can, is my advice. I can't imagine the religious police taking "it's none of your business" to heart. Religious Police is basically claiming the role of busybody and combining it with coercive violence. If you know anyone who makes the claim that that's a good thing, it's time to stop having anything to do with them.
One thing I've learned over the years is that lots of people cheat. While this may be a bad act, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are bad people - a distinction that took a long time to grok. Doesn't mean the victim needs to be sympathetic to them (I certainly wouldn't be, if I were the victim), but sometimes us innocent bystanders should be. Or if not forgiving, at least not willing to join in on the dog-pile. A simple "Yeah, maybe you should have split up before that, if things were so bad. Anyway, it's not my problem, so let's move on" should do, if it needs comment at all. In the end, what does going after a third-party cheater gain you? Nothing.
This whole situation is one in which there are no good guys, but we can unambiguously define a bad guy. Not Ashley Madison; though conceiving of, building, and maintaining such a project points to systemic sociopathy. Not the cheaters; while a lot of them are assholes, there's enough (like those gay, traveling, Saudis) that aren't that you should not indulge the dog-piling urge. It's the hackers. They tried to destroy a legal (if congenitally icky) company, thus imposing their questionable morals on others. In this I think they have little difference from the religious police. They're just gutless enough not to swing the truncheons themselves. Remember, they opted to release confidential information about random strangers to punish a company. And then they had the gall to claim it was Ashley Madison's fault that they had to release the data, as if they weren't independent moral actors. That like a bad trope that always makes me rage when I see it in fiction. "You forced me to shoot your wife when you didn't hand over your wallet. Her death is on you." No asshole, I think I can firmly put the blame on a murderous mugger. And bad a company as Ashely Madison is, and as bad as their policy to "delete" information was (not) implemented, I can definitely blame you guys for leaking it. Heads will literally roll over this. I hope someday you'll realize that you're to blame.
