Reflection Post
Ashley Madison: Hacking Relationships and the Internet
A few weeks ago, I found myself watching a documentary on Netflix called “Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies and Cyber Attacks”. I surprisingly saw a lot of issues discussed that we have been talking about in class. Surprised perhaps because a lot of the issues have not been on my radar before and are now on my mind but also surprised due to the nature of the website and this movie. I thought I was about to tuck into a juicy and cheesy scandal, not a documentary discussing massive flaws in the consumerism of the internet and databases.
The documentary, which came out in 2016, was written by Havana Marking and Marc Morgenstern. Besides using archive footage of interviews with past employees, it also interviews a Data Scientist and a person who considers himself a professional white hat hacker. The movie gives the history and effects of a data breach that happened in 2015, where hackers threatened to expose customers personal data, such as names, emails and credit card information, if the website was not closed down. Obviously, they did not close down, and this resulted in chaos ranging from some dramatic lawsuits to spousal suicide.
I was surprised to learn that the movie was discussing a terrible breach that happened in 2015, considering data breaches are still currently happening on a large scale today with other social media sites. In an article advocating for a digital environmental protection agency, “Silicon Valley Has Failed to Protect Our Data. Here’s How to Fix It”, Paul Ford discusses how most of these “leaks” or “breaches” are due to platforms gaining in power and significance and selling that to advertisers, allowing internet “spiders” to troll through sensitive data.
The documentary briefly touches upon white hat hackers and how they believe it is their ethical job to do just such trolling and scrolling through the internet in order to inform websites when a breach is easily attainable. They call it security evaluations. Ashley Madison ignored such warnings. This made me think about open access and databases. Although not directly apparent, I found this similar in the sense that certain social media websites are risking security in order to cut costs, while databases are also monetizing articles by having two large rival databases. This is clearly marking the consumerism that has leaked into all aspects of the internet.
A few other interesting take-a-ways that I found dealt with AI and the data they provided to Forbes. Ashley Madison created an algorithm that allowed fake bots to con customers into paying for conversations with them. Is this too dissimilar to the algorithms created into conning people into certain advertisements or political websites?
Ashley Madison also reported higher earnings than was real to Forbes. This made me think about the websites I viewed last week on visual data and what you said in class how data can go in any direction that you want depending on how you show it.
After the watching the movie, I did some research on some of the law suits that followed to see if any were similar to what Facebook and Google are going through now. It seemed that Ashley Madison tried to save themselves with their disclaimers. Brian Powers summarizes these terms and conditions in his 2015 article “Ashley Madison’s Online Terms and Conditions May Leave It Legally Undressed”:
- Use our site, and it’s not our problem if your data gets hacked.
- If you use our site, we are not liable for damages, and if we are, you can’t sue us for more than $5,000.
- You may be interacting with fembots and not actual human beings seeking to have affairs.
- If you sue us, you must do it via arbitration and you may not do it as part of a class action lawsuit.
I found this interesting because Powers ended up using the way back machine in order to see how they have been retroactively changing these terms and conditions and the deceit was proven by the internet archives. I found this interesting on many levels, it appeared that they clearly didn’t care who was sneaking into this “secure” website. Whither it be the way back machine, white hat hackers or black hat hackers.
The documentary ended with this quote from a white hat hacker: “There is no such thing as a secure system”. This is the exact point that Ford was making in his article.
“Unfortunately, ethics don’t scale as well as systems. We’ve poisoned ourselves, and more than a little. Given the money and power at stake, it’s going to be hard to get everyone to admit we’re sick.” (Ford, 2018)
Resources:
Amber Pasiak 