After some initial uncertainty it appears that the data released yesterday is in fact from the Ashley Madison hack that had been announced a little while back. The data contains not just email addresses but a lot of other information including internal corporate documents. As for the email addresses there will be some percentage that was entered by others as Ashley Madison did not require an email confirmation (so I would take any revelations with a grain of salt).
I believe that this hack and subsequent data leak provides a glimpse of a post privacy future. As I have argued before here on Continuations it is not ultimately possible to protect data and what we should be focused on instead is protecting people. Whether en masse, as in this case, or one person at a time, data will continue to come out. We need to work towards a society and individual behaviors that acknowledge this fact and if anything err on the side of more transparency and disclosure.
People have always had affairs. There is nothing new about that. People have also used technology as part of their affairs. For instance, when letters were the technology of the day people wrote letters to their lovers, which then occasionally were discovered. That’s for instance how Eleanor Roosevelt found out about FDR’s affair with Lucy Mercer. So it shouldn’t be at all surprising that people have been using the internet to have affairs. Facebook is apparently cited in one third of divorce cases.
The way forward here is not to pretend that there is a technological solution or to be sanctimonious about affairs. Instead what we need is to acknowledge that affairs are part of human behavior. There is lots of reason to believe that humans aren’t naturally monogamous. If you want a great read on this topic, I highly recommend “Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships.”
While it will be quite painful in the shortrun for many of the individuals whose affairs were or will be exposed as part of this hack, I think something good can come of it — a more measured view of affairs. Here in the US we have become less, rather than more, accepting of affairs over the past decades. Today public ridicule and divorce are common responses to the discovery of an affair. Maybe once we realize just how widespread and likely deeply evolutionary rooted affairs are we can become more forgiving and understanding.
This is why I will continue to advocate for a post privacy world. Secrets in the end wind up causing more damage than they were originally supposed to avoid. And as we learning every day now, eventually they all come out. A future of honesty about personal matters and transparency of government affairs is far preferable to any attempt of doubling down on technological or regulatory attempts to keep secrets.
