1. A data dump, which allegedly contains over 35 million email addresses, 33 million accounts with more detailed information (names and addresses), and every credit card transaction from the last seven years, is reported to have been posted online. It could be doctored or entirely fake, however: a hack was previously confirmed by the company, and early signs point to legitimacy. (Update: Brian Krebs was unsure, but now seems convinced; Ashley Madison’s official statement is ambiguous.)
3. However, 4chan users, and undoubtedly others, are already combing through data and posting their discoveries. They started by searching for people with government email addresses, university email addresses, and addresses associated with major corporations. This is unfolding very quickly, already revealing the email addresses of students, teachers, public servants and municipal employees.
7. This, on the other hand, is basically unprecedented? Most leaks of this size don’t implicate people in anything aside from patronizing major companies. This is new territory in terms of personal cost. The Ashley Madison hack is in some ways the first large scale real hack, in the popular, your-secrets-are-now-public sense of the word. It is plausible—likely?—that you will know someone in or affected by this dump.
8. Most of the responses and acknowledgements I’m reading now are either straight news stories or… jokes? I’m not sure anyone is really reckoning with how big this could be, yet. If the data becomes as public and available as seems likely right now, we’re talking about tens of millions of people who will be publicly confronted with choices they thought they made in private (or, in some cases, didn’t: Ashley Madison does not validate all email addresses). The result won’t just be getting caught, it will be getting caught in an incredibly visible way that could conceivably follow victims around the internet for years.
9. Such a scenario would present a number of new questions for many more internet users— questions the nature of which they’ve never really had to deal with. If the names and email addresses are available in a simple Google-like search, for example, will they search for their partners? Friends? Coworkers? Representatives? Family members? If so, why? If not, why not? Will you seek out the raw leak data after reading this post? Will news organizations, presented with user profiles associated with public figures, ask for comment? Treat each as news? Which ones? How? The last time people dealt with similar questions on a large scale was when troves of internal Sony documents, including emails, were leaked. Before that, it was when hundreds of private celebrity photos were stolen and released last year. That act was widely denounced, as were the millions of subsequent acts by the people who viewed the photos. But enough people looked at these photos to set traffic records for sites like Reddit. In any case, an incredible number of ethical questions are posed by this situation!
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