Ashley Madison & Technology Extremism

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Yes, the hack of the world’s largest online dating service for married people (in other words, the world’s largest website for adultery) filtered in on July 20th and shocked the over 32 million people who patronise the service. This was the beginning of a great downturn for Ashley Madison.

The service had been boasting about her anonymity & impregnable data security, but the hacker proved them wrong. Today, the hacker went ahead to create a searchable database for people to check if their information were among those obtained.

Hacking and theft of personal information from websites aren’t new, nevertheless, it an extreme practice, and in this case, a “technology extremism.”

I also consider the use of technology to encourage adultery - an act whose condemnation cuts across philosophical, religious and racial divides - as “technology extremism.”

Just has the world unites to fight religious extremism, I think it will be equally beneficial for humanity if we come together to fight this new wave of extremism.

As technology creators, innovators, and enthusiasts, it is our onus to engage in and encourage ethical technological practices and help preserve the last frontier of sanity in humanity.

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Technology is a tool. As with all tools, it can be used for good or ill. The only means of preventing “ill use” is regulation—bans, licensure, etc. Do you want to have to apply for a government permit to install a database, or use a programming language?

Some measure of chaos is inevitable as a direct consequence. Besides, with a 95% male audience, it turns out Ashley Madison wasn’t so much facilitating adultery as fleecing would-be adulterers!

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Well, it will be cumbersome and retrogressive for the government to totally regulate and control the technology space, though they do some in some sectors like telecoms (where you are required to purchase a licence before operation).

Let’s look at the this scenerio: you are free to walk into a store and purchase hand tools and chemicals, and you have the right to use them as you deem fit. However, if the usage of those tools and chemicals leads to the creation of objects which causes or may cause public harm, then the government has the right to hunt you and ensure that you do not cause or continue to cause harm.

Similarly, I think there should be concerted efforts by governments to ensure that hackers are tracked down and punished to serve as deterrents, and that people are not allowed to use technology to create highly-controversial services which may trigger attacks by these hackers.

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Adultery is a moral issue, usually between two consenting adults. The government has no business regulating that. If they can do that, then what stops them from blocking apps like Tinder, which people use for hookups (which some self-righteous people will also say is ‘wrong’)?

And as terrible as it, doesn’t cause public harm, so not sure comparing it to buying dangerous tools and chemicals is valid.

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I agree with @onyeka.

If you do not go to jail, get fined or punished where you live for committing adultery then sites like Ashely Madison should not be regulated there either. It is not a crime, it is just adultery that has been facilitated by technology.

As for hackers this can be equated to breaking and entering and stealing, which is a crime. The hackers have exploited a weaknesses in a system to gain access to something they should not have access to. This is hard to police but western countries are making strides to create cyber crime departments. For this to work we need police officials that have the proper education to understand the case and interpret the laws and considering the internet is an international platform, new laws have to be made to take into account cases of people in Ukraine ‘breaking into’ (hacking) a website in France or wherever. This is a new type of crime in the world today but the world will eventually catch up.

Regulating things that we deem controversial is a dangerous slope because it is the fastest way to kill innovation, there is nothing of value that initially does not make someone somewhere uneasy or upset. The biggest things are always controversial. I am not saying Ashley Madisson is the new google but in the beginning it is not easy to tell the difference between a nuisance from something that will actually change the world, cause if the world worked like that we would not have companies like Uber today and because of this I vote for no regulation or screening of anything that does not directly break the law. Who knows Ashley Madison might give us some dope open source software.

When I think of technology extremism (if there is such a thing yet) I think of singularity, where we talk about merging man an machine to be one. This is taking technology to a point where not only are we changing the world but also changing what it is to be human and how humans may experience the world and the implications of that.

So as for the Ashley Madison case I think it is similar to someone breaking into a brothel and stealing their ledger and publicizing it, which if you take away the technology part is quite mundane.

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  1. What do you mean by ethical technological practices?

  2. What is the last frontier of sanity in humanity?

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Well, I believe with recent happenings, this should drive home the fact that there is no privacy online. It is an illusion. How would some of them be so careless to even use their companies emails?

As far as there was no law against “adultery”, there is no reason for the government to regulate sites trying to automate it.

Though, there are cases were the government (Not Nigerian) has tried to regulate internet activity like banning and tracing the owners of child pornography sites, clamping down on creators of piracy sites etc.

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Government doesn’t control the technologies of telecommunications, they regulate the airwaves (radio frequencies), which are a commons. There is no equivalent shared substrate or commons requiring protection for software technologies.

Ok, so what’s the public harm here? In cases where hacking is used to target financial institutions, defense installations, or even simply to steal identities, there are existing laws that prosecute such actions. So what’s particular about hacking Ashley Madison that requires new legislation? The owners of Ashley Madison can seek law enforcement recourse, but there is no public security interest here.

What happens when the government deems a service like BudgIT, critical of the government but vital and beneficial to the people, to be “highly controversial”? Giving government control over what sorts of sites and services people can create is profoundly unwise.

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Thanks @onyeka, @Oluseyi, @akamaozu, & @adim86 for the great discussion here.

In as much as we believe in non-interference of the government in technology, there should also be a balance. We all know that there is no absolute human rights. All human rights have clauses to check against abuses and protect the very people who are granted these rights.

Government mustn’t wait until technology causes public harm before regulation comes in. Technology is simply one of those tools created by man, and as with everything human, there will be abuses. So how do we check against those abuses? I try not to overhype technology. It’s just a tool. The most important factor are the humans who use the technology; not technology itself. We must strive to protect humans against themselves while making use of technology. We, the citizens, also have the responsibility to protect technology from abuses of overzealous governments. So we all have roles to play.

Let’s look at some examples:

  1. The FRSC is mandated to arrest or fine a driver who breaks traffic laws such as non-use of seat belts or driving when broken windshields. We will argue that these offences affects the driver only. However, the government is constitutionally mandated to safeguard lives and properties, including protecting people from taking their own lives.
  2. Suicide is a crime is almost every country. No one is allowed to take his or her own life.

In the case of Ashley Madison, it was reported that most users of the site used it as an investigative tool to find out if their spouses were cheating. Now, we should not ignore the impact of such a tool on marriages and the nation at large. How many marriages or relationships have been dissolved because of Ashley Madison? How many children has been left in broken homes because of AM? How many people have committed suicides because of AM? How many people have been shot due to jealousy because of AM?

Nowadays, we struggle so hard to separate morality and technology, then beat our chests and tag ourselves as “civilised” because we close our eyes to sheer immorality in order to appear complaint with modern liberation movements. But I’m sure that deep inside us, we wish the world was more moral and safer, and that we could speak up and say the truth the way it is.

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People have been cheating before AM with the use of things like emails, texting, Facebook, phone calls. People drive to the homes of people they’re cheating with. Following your argument, let’s ban all these things, as they also facilitate cheating.

Besides, if you don’t want a broken home, maybe don’t cheat on your partner? Kids have harmed themselves as a result of cyber-bullying. Should the government step in and regulate Facebook, Twitter?

Nowadays, we struggle so hard to separate morality and technology, then beat our chests and tag ourselves as “civilised” because we close our eyes to sheer immorality in order to appear complaint with modern liberation movements

What people do in their private lives is no one else’s business tbh. If they want to wreck their marriage, I’m personally not going to lose sleep over it. What you consider immoral, someone else might consider moral. People have been cheating since the beginning of time. Nigerians included, and many of them aren’t using a website to do it. Just because it bothers your belief system doesn’t mean other people have to do anything about it. There is no public (PHYSICAL) harm in adultery, so again, it doesn’t work as a comparison to road safety.

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Ashley Madison is not the cause, it’s just a tool. Bad things will always happen. The government has no right to regulate it.

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Silk road is just a tool too. Same as kazaa.

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At the center of the argument driving against gay marriages is that it threatens the tenets of familial standards as we know it.

Actions of 2 consenting adults, causing no direct 3rd party harm, yes. But the perceived harm threatens to uprooting core societal standards, the latter is for the state to protect. But the arguments pales when pitted against human rights, which also is protected by the supreme state. And that’s where it ends.

It is a God given right for 2 folks to consummate, even paper-love, in Marriage, and its the states duty to bind it. There are laws that protect a marriage against adulterous damages, reason divorce settlements take a headspin when adultery is involved.

When you commit adultery you’ve wrong the state, and your spouse; including all the family members involved. This is not just an emotive argument, its binding in Law.

Concerning adultery and Ashley Madison, it threatens the tenets of marriage/families. Societies are built on families. Adultery threatens it, and adultery is one of the few ways the state recognizes harm to the institution of marriage which she is bound to protect.

Bottomline, you can’t go to jail for committing adultery but the state can choose to punish you by taking your marriage, your kids, your money away from you in an act of punishment. But the offended spouse has to file for a divorce to set things in motion. And madam justice will be all too glad to let the hammer fall!

Where the state recognises harm to the society it is bound to intervene, how much it intervenes in a democracy is only reflective of the threat and the alliance.

Twitter/facebook can’t be punished for cyber bullying because that’s not what they sell, it just happens to surface in social networks, the government can only hound social networks to better moderate their platforms. Working together with the judiciary arm to crack down the Ill.

If a twitter at any point defended online bullying in a bid to save users, the state would have cracked down directly on them.

Ashley Madison is identifying her self as the proponent to an illl.

However it’s a bit tricky! How much the state is allowed to do against.

PS: Please someone correct me if am wrong I thought the class suit against Madison is from users who had their information leaked in the hack.

More like a case of suing the security company cuz they couldn’t stop the thief.

Haven’t heard of the adultery angle. The state can’t sue anyone for adultery.

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