Last week a hacker group going by the moniker “Impact Team” breached the servers of Ashley Madison, a hookup site mainly marketed to people looking to engage in extramarital affairs.
The subsequent online data dump that outed the site’s users has started a heated debate: Is what the hackers did ethically sound?
The quick answer is no.
The don’t-cheat-and-nothing-bad-will-happen-to-you self-righteous camp has applauded the hackers. They see the hack as a moral triumph—adulterous spouses getting what was coming to them. After all, breaking a vow of monogamy is hurtful and destructive.
In this light, the hackers are merely whistleblowers, doing public good by revealing deception.
In a manifesto published alongside the stolen data, the hackers pointed at Ashley Madison’s unscrupulous business practices as their justification. They claimed that the Canadian-based company duped users, citing a $19 full delete option the website offered that would ostensibly wipe any trace of a user ever signing up.
Although this service made millions for Avid Life Media, the company that owns Ashley Madison, it is evident by the leak that data from customers who paid to be removed had been retained. The service has since been made free to users.
But how does punishing the same users you claim are being gouged by Ashley Madison make any sense?
The revelation of sensitive and private data is also troubling. Infidelity, as reprehensible as it is, is a personal matter that should be kept in the marital sphere. The schadenfreudes relishing the shaming of cheaters fail to realize that exposing information about a cheater also carries the very real potential of publicly humiliating the cheaters’ spouses.
Moreover, in an article on The Intercept, journalist Glenn Greenwald points out there are many people who may have used the site for things other than out-and-out cheating such as those in polyamorous relationships, those who had signed up but never actually went through with any sexual acts or even researchers or journalists observing the site’s activity.
Real world consequences of the hacks have already begun: extortion, spamming and even suicides have been blamed on the data dump of personal information, which includes users’ names, zip codes, email addresses and sexual proclivities.
It’s also important to remember that people around the world, some who live in countries that make it a capital offence to be gay and who use the site to facilitate discreet sexual liaisons use Ashley Madison. The information that has been leaked could even put their lives at risk.
This particular situation perfectly demonstrates the importance of being able to think critically about current events and consider a myriad of nuances. Nothing is ever black and white and are always more complex than sensationalist headlines make them out to be.
You can still feel that cheating and lying to your partner is immoral and yet disagree with what the hackers did. The ethical quandary posed here is not so much a question of who is right, but who is less wrong.