DID YOU KNOW Ashley Madison AKA "life is short, have an affair" Got Hacked?

Ashley Madison, the “life is short, have an affair” site for discreet married connections has been hacked. According to The Impact Team, a hacker group, that has taken credit for the hack they targeted Ashley Madison because of deceptive business practices. The Ashley Madison website claims to have a service that for $19 deletes your account completely but off course the website doesn’t really delete everything it still saves the names, credit cards and the purchase of the $19 delete service. While on the one hand that would appear to violate the notion of the service in and of itself, the reality is that there isn’t a way to do it otherwise. As long as a credit card holder can contest a credit card charge, the merchant that makes a credit card sale MUST keep the information.

Owned by Avid Life Media in Toronto, Canada; Ashley Madison offers its services in fifty countries including big countries like the United States and China and small countries like Belgium and Estonia . According to some reports it has 29 million users world wide even though the website itself says it has more than 37 million members. So today at least 29 million people are wondering if their names and addresses are now out there for everyone to see. The reality is that although this time it is Ashley Madison and last time it was AdultFriendFinder.com; if you are on one of these websites you are either out there or about to be.

Whatever you may be doing on the internet if you are paying for something online there is a high likelihood that it can be traced back to you. If you are paying with a credit card with your full name and address the fact is that the transaction regardless of whether it is for something you are proud of and want the world to know or something that you would prefer stay private; it can fairly easily become a public transaction. You can put some distance by buying a pre-paid debit card with cash at some establishment that sells such debit cards but some of the debit cards require you to input at least some information to actually activate them. Then again if you have something shipped with a purchase the shipping name and address will lead back to if not directly then indirectly to you the buyer.

The sex industry has been at the forefront of a lot of things on the internet like figuring out how to get people to pay way before the general public was comfortable buying from Amazon or eBay. Now whether they like it or not, the online sex industry is probably at the forefront of figuring out how to give clients the products they want with the privacy they desire.

What do you think? Are Ashley Madison and other sites like it guilty of deliberate false advertising? Is The Impact Team right to target sites like Ashley Madison?