As this whole Ashley Madison adultery web site story has played out I honestly haven’t had much to say about it. It’s salacious to be sure and it may wind up pulling in all sorts of interesting figures, including political ones, but there just hasn’t seemed to be much meat to the story in terms of our usual coverage beat here. But now that the initial hack has been spread around the non-dark web, the tale is turning into an octopus with tendrils reaching everywhere. The exposure of their list of users has allegedly led to a couple of suicides, and the company is now facing lawsuits over their failure to keep the identities of the adulterers (or would be adulterers) secure. (USA Today)

Users in California, Texas, Missouri, Georgia, Tennessee and Minnesota have filed suits against the site, claiming negligence, breach of contract and privacy violations, the Associated Press reported.

The suits claim the site failed to take reasonable steps to protect the security of its users, including those who paid a special fee to have their information deleted…

The Federal Trade Commission “can’t comment on whether we’re investigating a specific site,” said spokesman Jay Mayfield.

However a ruling in the Third Circuit Court on Monday about a different company affirmed that the FTC has the authority to hold companies accountable for failing to safeguard consumer data.

The first thing I have to wonder is how “accountable” we hold a business if they didn’t voluntarily release user data, but had it illegally stolen from them, assuming they took at least the minimum industry standard precautions. And why limit that to businesses? Will anyone be suing the federal government over the OPM hack? That seems far more serious and the victims far more sympathetic than the users of the Ashley Madison site.

But digging down a bit below the surface, it seems to me that the users aren’t really that upset about any hypothetical breach of privacy or release of their credit card information. They’re angry that they were caught cheating. The response to that is going to be swift and ferocious, particularly since the vast, vast majority of the users were men whose wives will no doubt be keenly interested in their husbands’ communications through this “service.”

That much is understandable to be sure, but how much further might the retribution go? I was rather taken aback to see someone already posing the question of whether or not somebody can be fired from a federal government job over adultery. (Washington Post)

Now that the Ashley Madison hack has outed as many as 15,000 federal employees and active duty military, government agencies say they’re combing through the e-mail addresses of possible adulterers to see if their extramarital activity on work time amounts to anything punishable.

The rules of the game for morality in federal offices may be straightforward for pornography (watching it can definitely get you fired) — but the kind of skeleton in the closet that showed up in the trove of 36 million users exposed on the cheating Web site presents officials with a murkier problem, experts say.

The rules vary on the kind of personal use of work computers that’s allowed on government time. Mostly, they’re more restrictive than a private company’s. It’s okay to make a doctor’s appointment, call the babysitter, tell your spouse you’ll be home late. It’s okay to check on your investments during the stock market’s current nosedive. These are technically called “private use” exceptions to authorized uses of government property.

Things you can’t do from your government e-mail address: Endorse a product or service, sell a product for profit, advertise or do anything else that “interferes with the agency’s mission or brings discredit to the agency.” Pornography, by being sexually explicit, falls into this category.

The title of the article may seem a bit misleading because it sounds like they’re hedging around any claim that they can fire you for the actual “adultery” part of what’s going on, but rather for violating computer usage policies. (Personally I think if you’re using your government computer for that you might instead be fired for terminal stupidity, but that’s just me.) The military can drum you out for adultery, but can the federal government do the same to a civilian employee? And assuming they can’t, I’m not sure where they draw the line on the computer usage thing. Pornography is one thing, but this is more of a “dating service” in a distorted, nasty sort of way. Do they fire people for checking their Match.com responses at the office? I know that some of the government workers I’ve done business with do some shopping at work while on break and they don’t seem to have a problem with that.

Perhaps we’re seeing more of a backlash because people simply don’t like cheaters and are willing to tolerate seeing them get whacked around a bit more. A recent collection of feedback at USA Today from readers showed an overwhelming tendency for people to say that the Ashley Madison subscribers were basically getting what they had coming to them. I would hope that this doesn’t include suicide, but I have to admit that I’m rather sympathetic with the crowd on this one. If you went out looking for a way to cheat on your spouse and you got caught – even through some strange internet hacking scheme beyond your control – you really shouldn’t expect a lot of sympathy if everyone starts treating you like a dirtbag.

But in closing, while I’m happy to write off at least some of the complaints of the users, what about the owners and operators of Ashley Madison themselves? They were putting out a product specifically designed to allow people to do something disreputable, but generally not illegal. Should we be harder on them and hold them to a tougher legal standard than someone selling shaving accessories online? It seems to me that they were delivering what the market would bear and they didn’t just give out the cheaters’ information. They were hacked. So was nearly every federal agency in the government and a large slice of the major companies around the country. Did anyone sue Sony Pictures for losing control of their data and embarrassing a different group of awful people? I’m just saying that we may be going after the wrong target here.