STFU NEWS: The AshleyMadison Data Dump

I'd expect they would argue this is proprietary data and they'd lose, but I doubt they would get slapped for doing it. Would love to hear from one of the attorneys on GFY in that regard...

Haha! Now that was a good one. :D

One of the questionable things about this is if AM has a copyright filed with the US copyright office for the database. Curioser and curioser....

If a giant as Ashley Madison isn't safe ... what's left for the little guys??

Sure was

STFU , Fitty Times

The data release could have severe consequences for U.S. service members if found to be real. Several tech websites reported that more than 15,000 email addresses were government and military ones.

Adultery, under certain criteria including the misuse of government time and resources, is a crime in the U.S. armed forces and can lead to dishonorable discharge or imprisonment.

I'd be very surprised to see the government get involved in that way because it makes the military look bad, and verifying the accounts or when they were used etc would seem to be something outside their normal posture. However, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it were used to smear a high ranking individual, politician or anyone else with a meaningful degree of popularity or rank.

With regards to how this is possibly effecting surfer behavior this week during the mainstream media blitz....

We run sites and services in a lot of different adult sectors, so did a little math this morning and came up with the following:

1) Dating: We have run a "kinky dating" free site (kinkculture.com) for many years and the number of new signups per day is traditionally consistent. But, this week, new signups in the US are down by 30%, Canada dropped like a lead baloon, and a pretty steady flow of people deleting their accounts. Will be interested to see if things go back to normal after the media frenzy has died down. It's a totally free site (ad supported) that collects very little data beyond creating a nickname, adding their email address for match alerts, and then a lot of "what's your kink" info, so I'm guessing that a lot of folks are being gun shy at the moment.

2) Search: We also run a privacy-oriented adult search engine - boodigo.com - that does not mine or store any user data and provides users with an anonymous and encrypted search experience (and is heavily promoted this way in mainstream marketing). Boodigo also has very steady as a rock traffic, but within the first day of the AM data release news, traffic in the US and Canada went up by over 20%. I'm not sure if this is just some fluke, but suspect the AM news has some people now being more mindful in revealing that they are searching for "hardcore midget fartporn" lol

3) Paysites: No significant variation in traffic or conversions, although I a seeing a marked increase in privacy and TOS page views across the board for all of our paysites.

Time will of course tell what effects, big or small, this has on the overall adult industry, but I suspect the sector that is going to need some vigorous tap dancing will be dating.

That may well be one of the biggest lessons webmasters here can take away from this. But this has been a common thread among adult webmasters for as long as I can remember... cheapest host, cheapest registrar, cheapest writer, cheapest designer. I'd wager there are threads in the "looking to hire" section right now asking for cheap_____. I from day one looked at those who were successful online and went with their choices for the services I needed, and never once considered going cheap. And it payed off. Wheras going cheap can often come back to haunt you.

It's too bad that many won't learn from the Trashley Madison example at all.

One of the main points of concern there is the use of government emails for personal use to cruise and join sites like AM when they should be serving the people, and it's very likely going to bite a lot of elected officials in the ass.

Great post Colin

Best post so far in this discussion! Thanks Colin.

Would love to hear some numbers, even vague ones, from others to see if similar shifts are happening across many sites and networks right now.... Anyone else willing to share?

No credit card data was leaked, the database only has partial numbers.

Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING
Serial Number 78187090
Filing Date November 20, 2002

You cannot Trademark a database but its contents are your legal property. Database contents are not published (usually in their entirety anyway) so copyright IDK -- it seems a reach ... but it could be ...

Sounds like messy legal biz.....