Ask HN: Why are we people mad at Ashley Madison and not the hackers? | Hacker News Reader

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

4 pointscoreyp_111 comments

Seriously. I would understand if there was gross negligence (and I don't know any details of the hack), but my gut reaction is that we are angry at the wrong person.

Please forgive the harsh comparison, but isn't it like blaming a rape victim instead of the attacker?

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Because they charged money for a delete my account feature, and never actually did it.

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.

> 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?

>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)

Because people prefer honesty to dishonesty.

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

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.

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

The rape analogy is repugnant.

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.

It's interesting to see AM say nothing and I wonder if this is a well thought out plan. By not confirming the leak (and by practically ignoring it) it leaves their ashamed "users" plausible deniability. So, if your email address showed up on the list, you _could_ deny it as AM never confirmed that it was a real leak.

Just a thought...

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