Ashley Madison

Warning: *Privacy Not Included with this product

Ashley Madison

Review date: Feb. 12, 2021

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Mozilla says

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People voted: Very creepy

Infamous dating site Ashley Madison started back in 2001 to encourage affairs. The site's on again, off again tagline, "Life is short. Have an affair." pretty much sums up the app. Targeted mostly at married men looking to have affairs with women, the app works on a credit payment system. Women can sign up for free, men are required to pay in credits to initiate a conversation. The app says they prioritize discretion with features like the ability to blur photos and the inability to link your account to your social media. Use the special traveling features to find an affair in a city you are traveling to. Ashley Madison became big news in 2015 when hackers stole Ashley Madison's user data and leaked a huge amount of personal information about users on the site, causing quite the uproar when the names, addresses, and other personal information of millions of users who used the site to cheat on their spouses was made public.

What could happen if something goes wrong?

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.

  • mobile

Can it snoop on me? information

Camera

Device: N/A

App: Yes

Microphone

Device: N/A

App: No

Tracks location

Device: N/A

App: Yes

What can be used to sign up?

*Phone number is only required if a user chooses two-factor authentication provided by a third-party (Nexmo) after they have signed-up. Nexmo has its own Privacy Policy and if a user wants to delete their data on Ashley Madison, they need to seperatly contact Nexmo for the data they have collected to be deleted

What data does the company collect?

How does the company use this data?

Ashley Madison does not sell user data to third parties. The company may collect user data to deliver targeted advertising and share personal data with third parties, such as advertising agencies. Ashley Madison also uses non-personal, non-identifiable data for analysis purposes.

How can you control your data?

User can request to access, rectification and erasure by emailing [email protected] or [email protected]

What is the company’s known track record of protecting users’ data?

Average

Aside from Ashley Madison's infamous data breach in 2015, the dating app has no known incident in the last two year

Can this product be used offline?

No

User-friendly privacy information?

Yes

Links to privacy information

Does this product meet our Minimum Security Standards? information

No

Encryption

Yes

Customer Personal Information is encrypted at rest and in transit.

Strong password

No

Security updates

Yes

Manages vulnerabilities

Yes

Privacy policy

Yes

Does the product use AI? information

Yes

Ashley Madison uses AI for recommendations. According to Ashley Madison's Privacy Policy, section 13 Profiling: "We use Personal Data that you provide in your user profile combined with certain algorithms and machine based learning to improve our Platform search function and to present profiles to you which are more likely to be of interest – in particular based on the demographic data of individuals with whom you interact in order to present more profiles of other similar users that you appear to be interested in. You can elect to change your preferences at any time on your profiling. This does not amount to "automated decision making" which would have any significant impact on you."

Is this AI untrustworthy?

Can’t Determine

What kind of decisions does the AI make about you or for you?

Is the company transparent about how the AI works?

Can’t Determine

Does the user have control over the AI features?

Can’t Determine

*Privacy Not Included

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