Ashley Mad as Hell
Today I want to talk about some cyber-security issues because I’m pretty effing pissed off. Sorry.
Not really.
Allow me to point out that “Revenge Porn” has been something done to women for years. Per Wikipedia, since BEFORE the internet. See Beaver Hunt from the 1980s.
This is something women have been told is their fault. “If you weren’t a slut, that wouldn’t have happened.” Women have had close to zero support from the tech community or the legal community, police and legistlators.
It’s a disgrace how long it took to start shut down Revenge Porn sites and it’s a disgrace how long our culture has said, more or less “it happens to women, so I don’t care, besides, I might want to go have a look myself.”
Along comes Ashley Madison. A site where (overwhelmingly) men could sign up to be adulterers. So, of course, there was an immediate response to the effect that these men got what they deserved for being wanna-be cheaters, am I right? Because, hey.
No. I am not right.
The response was outrage from the tech community that this happened. Why, credentials were stolen and put up on pastebin and OH MY GOD, these men might be shamed for private behavior!! What an outrage THIS MUST BE STOPPED!!!
Well, gentlemen, where the hell have you been all these years?
All of the reporting I’ve seen has been entirely unsympathetic to the people affected by this leak. Perhaps you’re plugged into some internal debate that hasn’t been public, but the public reporting has been nothing but shadenfreude. The first person being outed being Duggar didn’t help with that. It’s almost impossible not to feel that particular event is karmic.
I’ve been seeing the same sort of coverage as Alanis. Things like pointing out the frequency of .gov addresses or the overwhelming lack of women on the site.
I don’t think that there’ll be serious fallout for most of them due to a combo of AM apparently not verifying user info and the whole repulsive “boys will be boys” mindset.
I actually agree with this. Yea there were some non sympathetic reporting, but outside of the “known” people, there were not really any “this was your fault” kind of reporting. And a few days later the reports were “oh even more people have signed up, isnt that great!” and then nothing.
And it seemed to me that the reports were about the hacking and blackmail, not the mostly men users.
Had this been a site for largely just women and not men and bots, then I think this would have played out a lot differently.
It is never okay to publish someone’s personal information online without their consent , as I’m sure many of the author / reviewer demonstrate in the romance world .
Fact is , those people used that site with an expectation of privacy and this was violated , it doesn’t matter if what they were doing is morally justifiable or not .
Of course it’s not morally justifiable. It’s a crime. And a slippery slope. I don’t care what a company is collecting your data for, it needs to be secure.
However, in the reporting I read, that aspect was completely submerged below the shadenfreude (sorry to keep using that word, but it could not be more perfect for the situation). Now, I’m not in the US so maybe it was different there? Here it was about the government addresses and one MP whose address was on the list.
Privacy? Online? Those two words do not belong in the same breath let alone the same sentence. No such thing. Nothing online is private. Nothing. Just harder to uncover. Cheating, infidelity, side piece. Whatever one wants to call it today. These folks needed to go Old Skool and stop reaching out to touch online. Do what men/women who “step out” have been doing for eons if one just has to have it. Clean yourself up, drive, take a bus or train two towns over and sit in a bar. Something will sashay by eventually.
In that case , maybe I should publish the names , email addresses and telephone numbers of random Internet bloggers , since it’ll all come out eventually Anyway .
Hell , I would probably be doing them a favour, allowing more of their readers to get in touch directly .
I always felt like AM was revenge porn of its own making, as in you had to pay them to have your information removed from the site. If that’s your business plan, it is seriously effed up.
I’m nodding with you, though, on the “so now that it’s happening to men it’s wrong?” bit. A celebrity has someone take pictures of her naked without her consent and posts them to the internet? Media falls all over itself saying “we won’t repost them but here’s where they were found” and how she ought to have known better, for being a popular woman, that she had no expectations of privacy in her own home.
I feel for the folks who are getting slammed by this, mostly because I feel peoples’ choices are their own and nobody should be doxxed, ever. I’ve seen a mix of media reactions, between “they got what they deserved” and “it’s ruining marriages (because women are so petty like that)”, and it’s all ugh. Yes, there are interesting data points in there, but none of them so interesting they supersede peoples’ lives (just as no breasts are so interesting they do the same).
Can we just stop doing this on a whole? Please?
I agree with the post. If the roles had been reversed, things the tides of hell would have been unleashed. Revenge porn was not about a woman cheating… it was about a woman trusting a partner. Yet still, when it released, “She should have known better.” Not, he should have been a decent human being and not shared the video. (or she if the case suited and there were a few cases that were.)
As far as cyber security? Cheating is cheating and always holds an element of being caught. No sympathy. I don’t care if they thought they were going to bump uglies in Fort Knox. You cheat, you know the risk. (Some studies have shown that in some cases that’s part of the draw)
JIMHO
Bobbi
I have very little respect for people who cheat in a relationship, but that fact is in all the years of women being subjected to revenge porn sites, the tech community expressed no outrage. No one said, hey, maybe we should take a look at the security that allowed this.
There was outrage when it was men being outed for behavior they believed would remain private. The tech bloggers were all, oh my god, we have to do something about security breaches like this!!!
As for the issues of privacy and the internet, the fact that technology has failed to protect privacy does not mean there’s no harm or wrong.
Violations of privacy on the web are just as wrong as violations of privacy that occur off the web. The fact that on the web they occur as often and as massively as they do is not a sufficient argument for doing nothing, and it’s no justification for blaming the victims.
Put the blame where it belongs: on the companies (and their management) who put their profits ahead of decency.