Ashley Madison

Oh, Ashley Madison. We already know what could happen if something goes wrong because it all went very, very wrong in 2015 when hackers stole the personal information of millions of users and posted it online. For a site that promotes cheating on married partners, that was bad. Suicides, divorces, broken hearts and families, and lots of public shaming all happened. Is Ashley Madison any safer for users today than it was back in 2015? Likely, yes. They did take measures to beef up their security after the hack and now offer two-factor authentication and anonymous payment systems, among other security enhancements. They say the won't sell your data, which is good. They may share your data with third parties for advertising purposes, which is pretty common but still, not great. And they've had no known data breaches in the past two years,. However, we were able to log into the app using a very weak password of 12345, which, for a company that claims to have really beefed up security is pretty bad, and means the fail our Minimum Security Standards. Ashley Madison uses machine learning algorithms to learn about your preferences based who you show interest in on the site to give you more profiles of similar users. They do say you can change your preferences in your profile to adjust your matches though, which is good. Could hackers steal users' personal data and share in with the world again? Absolutely. They could do that with anything site though, but one that promotes affairs brings a special set of concerns around that.