Oh yeah that Ashley Madison hack is a gold mine for people who want to blackmail others. So if anything the take away from this should be to check and make sure that if any of your employees have important company data, see if they were in that hack.

Not just Ashley Madison. Okcupid. Tinder. Grindr. That group sex site that was just mentioned on HN [1]. Any dating site that is laissez faire about their data and API access (ie all of them) is a trove of information for building a dataset of morally flexible individuals (when correlated against public records).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20650069

None of those other sites are even similar to Ashley Madison. There is nothing morally wrong with dating using apps or being gay. But I expect most people to agree that cheating is definitely not morally clear.

In fact, the latter ones are so ubiquitous, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a person in a major US city in their 20s who was single for a period of time in the past 5 years and haven't used one of those apps.

The apps alone are not the signal. The app data combined with other data sources is the signal. It can demonstrate intent.

Intent to what? Date?

Tinder? I’ve never used it but it’s used by a lot of people I know for legitimate dating.

Tinder profile + public marriage record = possible hit. I know married folk who use Tinder (some ethically non-monogamous, some not so ethically), so some human review in your workflow would be required.

From previous experience consuming public record data sources programmatically, a proof of concept would take no more than a full day of work. I am not suggesting one do this, only that pandora's box is already open.

> * use that to target those folks in their roles for further scrutiny. Insider risk management sort of thing, before it turns into securities fraud.*

Or said in one word: blackmail.

There's no sugar coating it. You'd be collecting data points and analyzing them to pursue your own justice without due process. That's quite a dangerous thing to claim to want to do in the name of "insider risk management".

Having been responsible for standing up insider risk management protocols and systems in financial services, this usually occurs at high level executive/senior roles and it's part of your employment agreement that data will be collected and evaluated for the purpose (in a similar sense to an overzealous, continuous background check).

I don't support blackmail in any form, full stop. I do want to know if you're going to embezzle millions of dollars before you do, as do shareholders or customers (if you're managing assets) of the organization.

Isn't that sort of the premise of China's social score/credit experiment?

Also the premise of a Black Mirror episode.

And soon, it will the premise of everyday life in the US. Whoopee!