Ashley Madison Code Shows More Women, and More Bots

Putting aside the issue of duping people with fake profiles and bots for a second, this is what I found the most interesting:

"As I wrote last week, I came across three columns in one of those tables called “bc_email_last_time,” “bc_chat_last_time,” and “email_reply_last_time.” ... I concluded that the datestamps in those columns referred to the last time people checked their Ashley Madison messages, or tried to start a chat. ... But I was wrong. It’s a lot weirder than that. Those columns in the data don’t record human activity at all. They record the last time a bot—or “engager” in Ashley Madison’s internal parlance—emailed or chatted with a member of the site."

So basically, all of those conclusions drawn in the previous article about 99% of the female accounts being inactive or fake were made based on a complete misunderstanding of the data. To their credit, they've done some deeper digging now and posted a correction on the other article, but after seeing so many other "news" sites unquestioningly repost the same flawed statistics, it just boggles my mind how quickly misinformation can spread. Not that I support the site and its scummy business practices, or its users and their scummy personal practices, but can we at least make sure we get the facts straight before breaking out the torches and pitchforks?

"What I have learned from examining the site’s the source code is that Ashley Madison’s army of fembots appears to have been a sophisticated, deliberate, and lucrative fraud. The code tells the story of a company trying to weave the illusion that women on the site were plentiful and eager. Whatever the total number of real, active female Ashley Madison users is, the company was clearly on a desperate quest to design legions of fake women to interact with the men on the site."

No matter how much they shore up the site, even if they manage to get people believing their anonymity is safe again, they'll never recover from the far more damaging fraud allegations. Actually, something like this might even enable going after the CEO personally, if the trove proves he was actively directing the fraud.

Great article. I wonder why the full database hasn't been released? Will be a whole additional scandal if full message logs are released in a future dump.