Very early Tuesday early morning, Reuters out of cash the news headlines that AvidLife Media, the moms and dad organization of affair-driven dating/hookup websites Ashley Madison, is now undergoing a probe of the usa Federal Trade fee. While AvidLife formally “said it doesn’t know the focus of its own FTC researching,” it’s simple enough to find out precisely what is at concern right here.

About a year ago, in July 2015, Ashley Madison ended up being hacked by a group referred to as Impact Team. The hackers proceeded to threaten to drip the site’s visitors checklist if AvidLife mass media didn’t shut down both Ashley Madison and brother website Set up people, which in theory connected young “sugar baby” female with old, wealthier, “sugar father” guys. The database was eventually released…which was actually exactly the idea from the iceberg.

Initial, much more instant and clear worry is that the providers’s option to spend to completely remove a merchant account performedn’t may actually really do something. Revealing reality behind the “paid deletion” choice got quickly expose to-be a primary objective in hack. The 2nd was actually something which was in fact suspected but was difficult to show until Gizmodo’s Annalen Newitz crunched the figures when you look at the databases:

Your huge, great majority of feminine reports didn’t fit in with actual humans, far less real lady. Cross-referencing elements of problems towards California lawyer standard making use of site’s resource code resulted in a lot more verification. While currently terrible, it’s worse considering you have to pay added to send/reply to communications, though they certainly were delivered by Ashley Madison robots.

Strangely, although the Avid Life mass media told Reuters which they didn’t understand what the FTC examination centers around, Ashley Madison’s CEO mentioned usually. More