

Ask HN: Why are we people mad at Ashley Madison and not the hackers? - coreyp_1

Seriously.  I would understand if there was gross negligence (and I don&#x27;t know any details of the hack), but my gut reaction is that we are angry at the wrong person.<p>Please forgive the harsh comparison, but isn&#x27;t it like blaming a rape victim instead of the attacker?
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Killswitch
Because they charged money for a delete my account feature, and never actually
did it.

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sheepmullet
If your bank told you it stored your money in a secure safe but in reality was
hiding it under the mattress of the account manager, is it wrong to be angry
with the bank?

Or to use a rape analogy it's more like I pay you to babysit my daughter and
you decide to take her to a seedy part of town to buy drugs and she gets
raped.

The real victim is the end user, and not the company.

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dragonwriter
> Why are we people mad at Ashley Madison and not the hackers?

I dunno. Why are you? (Alternatively, why are you abusing the first person
when what you should be using is the third person and identifying precisely
who you are talking about?)

More importantly, where is the evidence that people who are mad at Ashley
Madison are not _also_ mad at the hackers?

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27182818284
>but my gut reaction is that we are angry at the wrong person

People are mad in general because a lot of what AM promised wasn't really
true. For example, its deletion of profiles which they charged for. Also not
true seems to be the number of women on the site, which (although estimates
very) seems to be very skewed and possibly bolstered with lots of fake
profiles.

With respect to the gross negligence, the original hack called out the company
and even mentioned someone by name with an apologetic message--as if they knew
that person was trying to stop the negligence on the inside but failed. (I
doubt it was really bad negligence regardless. it is just more common for
negligence to be the normal kind)

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VOYD
Because people prefer honesty to dishonesty.

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a_lifters_life
The hackers did the right thing. People using AM had it coming to them.

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photosinensis
The biggest problem is that Avid Life Media has done jack squat in response to
the data leak. They've not communicated any kind of risk mitigation strategy.
They've not allowed users to change their compromised passwords. They've not
made any efforts to contact affected users.

This is like a rape victim not only trying to pretend the whole thing didn't
happen, but all the while knowing that her attacker had HIV, has good reason
to believe she's seroconverted, and is _still_ having unprotected sex with her
regular partners without telling them anything.

While the company is a victim here, their actions are themselves criminally
wrong.

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araxhiel
The analogy of a victim of rape, though crude, is quite right (and left me
quite impressed, to be honest).

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DanBC
The rape analogy is repugnant.

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JacobAldridge
Yup - 'blaming the victim of a crime' would have been sufficient to make the
OP's point, though I know media conversations on the topic are the likely
reason why the analogy he chose came to mind.

