Friday, August 28, 2015

Ashley Madison Should Change Their Name To Catfish

I know you're getting Ashley Madison fatigue, but this news was too funny to pass up. Us Weekly reports that the most illuminating thing that was revealed by the leaked data is that the majority of the female accounts on the site were fake! The site was already unbalanced, with 31 million accounts belonging to men and only 5 million to women. But the amount of women is actually way under that number. When looking into whether or not users had ever checked messages on the site, Gozmodo's editor-in-chief Annalee Newitz found that over 20 million men had, while only 1,492 women did. Newitz gave the following summation of the data:

"What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots... When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy. 

Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created. Ashley Madison employees did a pretty decent job making their millions of women’s accounts look alive. They left the data in these inactive accounts visible to men, showing nicknames, pictures, sexy comments. But when it came to data that was only visible on to company admins, they got sloppy.... Either way, we’re left with data that suggests Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there."


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