People who are familiar with the Ashley Madison fiasco might initially wonder why Netflix is taking such a gentle approach to this story. For the first episode of three, Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal seems more like a sales pitch for the adultery site than a serious investigative documentary, though it does eventually get to the grit of the saga. Ashley Madison, you may recall, was – and, astonishingly, remains – a dating site for married people who want to have an affair, discreetly. In 2015, a mysterious hacking group threatened to leak, then did leak, details of the site’s users, exposing many men to their unsuspecting families, colleagues and, in some cases, constituents. The hackers followed this with a second data dump, revealing serious privacy failings within the company itself, as well as embarrassing personal details about its publicity-courting, soon to be ex-CEO, Noel Biderman.
This is an era-defining tale: an online security horror story that touches on greedy tech corporations, late-stage capitalism, religious hypocrisy and proto-AI. Ashley Madison, a name taken from two popular girls’ names in the US and chosen because it “seemed a little upper class”, quickly turned into a “cash cow”, according to its former vice-president of sales, Evan Back. Back is an entertaining interviewee and often makes this seem like much more of a lark than the leak and its fallout turned out to be. Users were charged for credits to message other users. Cannily, and outrageously, they were also charged for a “permanent delete” function that promised to remove any trace of them from the site. Needless to say, this promise was nothing more than snake oil.
