Nine years after hackers targeted Ashley Madison, the dating site for wannabe adulterers, many people still don't grasp what was truly chilling about the scandal, says Annalee Newitz

Found via the author’s Mastodon Post

Generally, the media has focused on the (mainly) men whose names and desires were taken from the company’s subscriber database and shared with the world. […] Ashley Madison was never really about that. Avid Life Media, its parent company, wasn’t in the business of sex, it was in the business of bots. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads.

  • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    171·
    5 months ago

    Had a buddy and told him to use a throw away card. He said it will be fine. I told him not to use his main email address. He had access to fifty or more domains he could have used. He said no it will be fine. The day it broke he called me and I just laughed at him. I had already grabbed the database and had it loaded up where it could be queried. He was there and so were so many other people in our small town. They used their local ISP email which I was the administrator for at that time. Most used their regular cards with their name on it. Many of the payment methods listed though were reloadable throw away cards.