Re:The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
by camillomiller on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @03:55PM
(#10088023)
Nope, maybe my formulation was a bit foggy, but that's not my point.
I'm not saying that the old adage that you shouldn't be worried about your privacy being breached if you have done no harm or if you have nothing to hide. Quite the contrary.
Mine was a very specific assertion related to the king of leak we're witnessing: what's making this data so relevant and prone to gossip is the way we give for granted the monogamous nature of our relationship and how we deal with a moral set of dogmas that society inculcates on us "because God says so".
Who doesn't live by these archaic impositions and accepts more open forms of relationship has a strong advantage because his pursuit of perfectly natural sexual desires doesn't need to be hidden and is not considered (especially by the partner) as an immoral and punishable thing.
This seems to be a common view of the left on HN. The biggest example being the most common defense of privacy I see: "Gays need privacy because many live in countries where they will be killed if found out". So in other words, once the entire world is accepting of gays, there will no longer be a justification for the existence of privacy.
This is the wrong way to be looking at this issue. Regardless of what the users of this site did, it does not excuse the behavior of other parties. It doesn't excuse Ashley Madison's failure to protect user data. It doesn't excuse the hackers theft of that data. It doesn't excuse the disclosure of that data by the hackers or people on Twitter.
Lamenting people's hangups about infidelity is the wrong response to this situation.