Ashley Madison leak: Is this newsworthy?

There's been some recent IRS hackings, potentially affecting a couple hundred thousand people. I think the story is that the hackers could file fraudulent refund claims.

 

The IRS hacks happened earlier this year but after April 15, IIRC. The hacks that resulted in fraudulent claims were, reportedly, because tax filing services were hacked (TurboTax was adamant that it wasn't hacked).

 

It might technically be on the books, but it wouldn't be enforceable.

 

Yeah, we saw that in 1998.

 

They shouldn't worry. I'm sure they have nothing to hide.

 

If anything, I'd say that if it were enforced, that someone could try to claim that the law is unconstitutional, based upon previous precedents of privacy in the bedroom.

 

What are the odds Anthony Weiner is on AM?

 

Think Carlos Danger is more of a fetlife guy.

 

I guess it's really not news. There are only three -- three! -- zip codes in the country that are not represented among AM users.

There were only 3 ZIP codes in America without any Ashley Madison accounts — here they are

Yes, apparently, (nearly) everybody's doing it.

 

Not everybody.

As Dick has long said, they lie about their numbers (Alt headline: Make $25,000 per year writing fake profiles):

Ashley Madison has long claimed, in triumphant news releases and slick, Web-ready graphics, that it is one of the few dating sites that really clicks with women. According to statistics CEO Noel Biderman has trumpeted in the media, Ashley Madison enjoys an overall 70/30 gender split — with a 1:1 male/female ratio among the under-30 set.

But the user records laid bare by hackers last week tell a very different story: Of the more than 35 million records released, only 5 million — a mere 15 percent — actually belonged to women.

This discrepancy may be the smoking gun that proves something angry users, industry insiders and government watchdogs have alleged for some time: that when it comes to reporting their own user numbers, paid-dating sites distort, manipulate … and sometimes straight-up lie.

“Ashley Madison has paid people to write profiles, and they’ve allowed fake profiles to proliferate on their site,” said David Evans, an industry consultant who has contracted with Ashley Madison in the past and has tracked the business of online dating since 2002. “Tons of sites are guilty of that. That’s not news.”

It may be news, however, to the legions of paying online daters who have treated tales of “date bait” as message-board apocrypha — and not as a tangible, industry-wide practice that they themselves have encountered.

Ryan Pitcher, who spent two years in the late aughts running a fake-profile team for Global Personals — parent of the massive, multinational dating platform WhiteLabelDating.com — explains the scheme like this: Paid-dating sites only make money when potential customers believe they’re sitting on a huge pot of available dates — so many dates, in fact, that it’s worth ponying up 20 or 30 dollars a month just to message them.

For lots of sites, acquiring such a pot is pretty easy. If you’re a niche site running off a platform like White Label — which thousands of niche dating sites do — that partnership will frequently come preloaded with a database of real users. Meanwhile, if you’re peddling run-of-the-mill, straight-laced dating, a la Match or eHarmony, you can just buy Facebook ads and run 10-second spots on TV.

“Adult dating” and hook-up sites have a serious problem, though, Pitcher says: While they have no problem attracting interested guys, they absolutely bomb when it comes to women. Some of that has to do with openly misogynist marketing; some of it relates to women’s well-conditioned social and sexual roles; much of it has to do with the fact that being a rare woman on a site full of desperate, oversexed, uninhibited dudes is objectively terrible.

Whatever the exact cause, on the adult sites Pitcher worked on, real women accounted for less than 2 percent of total profiles. And so he and a 28-person team, working in Global Personals’ vaguely named “admin” department, spent their work hours crafting very sexy, very fictional profiles and messaging users from them. Profile-writers made roughly $25,000 a year, with bonuses for hitting certain monthly subscription targets.

Ashley Madison faked female profiles to lure men in, hacked data suggest

 

Geez. Alaska and New Mexico.

My guess was all three would be in Utah.