Who is Ashley Madison?

Mark Mirtchouk

For the past month, the news was all about this Ashley Madison leak. At first, I thought it was about some girl and I was not trying to figure it out what’s it all about. Finally, I looked into it and read two articles by Glenn Greenwald which made me realize that the problem was much interesting than some Ashley girl getting her nude photos hacked. It was about a website Ashley Madison that is a dating site for married people who got hacked and the hackers leaked all the names and emails of its members. I am not going to go into the moral aspect of the story: it is not about whether it is ok to look for a sex partner online. As a future computer programmer, I am more interested in the position of the hackers. Why do they think they have the right to invade websites for their own profit? My understanding is that a web programmer has to design something that he or she thought of. For example, a website for a flower shop, an agricultural commune, or a friend’s wedding coordination website. People who hack someone else’s work, unless it’s a matter of national security, seem to me to be immoral. I understand that if somebody keeps a list of membership of terrorist that is targeting to hurt people, then it’s very noble to intercept this information in order to save peoples lives.  On the other hand, hacking into a website that has a list of people who want to have casual relationships is not the same. Again, I am not discussing, if what people are doing on Ashley Madison is moral or not; I am just saying that its private citizens with private information being hijacked and held for ransom. Anyone who has a Facebook account could understand that if a hacker got ahold of their private conversations or photographs, it would be upsetting if that information would become public. There is a very fine line between hacking for a noble cause and just plainly destroying people’s privacy. One can argue that the hackers of Ashley Madison did a good deed by discouraging immoral activities. Again, our nation security was not breached by people registering by Ashley Madison so the hackers had no moral right to hack and publish the private information.

For lots of people who are painfully shy, anti-social, or handicapped people, the internet became the only window into the world. Everybody trusts they have privacy in visiting websites, registering in chat rooms, and traveling the world threw the internet. The hackers who breached the security of Ashley Madison are discouraged those people from having social interaction. Teenagers who have a lot of puberty questions would be afraid to post them in chat rooms in fear that hackers could get this information. The hacking attack on Ashley Madison shows people that no website is safe and anything can be hacked and the information could be distributed. This hack might have made people believe that they did not have the freedom of expressing their opinions in the United States. People in China already know that because their government does spy on them and they don’t have freedom to express their opinions or do some private internet searches that they are interested in because they are restricted. Now, people in this country could now be afraid that they are in a similar situation like the people in China who get spied on. The only difference: the spies in this case are the hackers. Who knows that the hackers could do with our information?