Get the latest tech news

What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal

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

It has been nearly a decade since hackers dumped huge amounts of personal data from Ashley Madison, the infamous dating site which, back in 2015, catered mostly to men who wanted to cheat on their wives. 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. We found company emails in the data dump and discovered that Avid Life Media was also a small number of workers to generate fake profiles for more than 70,000 engager bots.

Get the Android app