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When the Ashley Madison hacks hit earlier this month, it didn’t take long for researchers to begin poring over the details and data. Impact Team, the group behind the hack, declared that it was releasing the information because Ashley Madison had lied about the male-female account ratio on its website. At the time, the hackers claimed that 90-95% of the accounts on Ashley Madison were male, with “thousands” of fake female profiles. New research shows this may have been a dramatic underestimation.

Gizmodo’s Analee Lewis combed through the database, looking for tell-tale signs that the 5.5 million female accounts on Ashley Madison were fake. Sure enough, she found some, including IP addresses that showed accounts were created from 127.0.0.1 and thousands of accounts that listed an AshleyMadison.com email address as their primary contact point. These email addresses were even listed in sequential, bot-like fashion — This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., etc.

One critical piece of information captured in the leak was the last date a user had checked their messages. If a user never checked their inbox, the field was completely blank. If they logged in even once, that information was recorded. Ashley Madison also records the last time a user answered messages; this can be handled in a separate field without actually clicking on the inbox, which is why the data logs show different numbers for the women who checked mail versus replying to a message.

In both cases, however, the numbers are staggeringly low.

Data courtesy of Gawker.com

Over 20 million male customers had checked their Ashley Madison email boxes at least once. The number of females who checked their inboxes stands at 1,492.

There have already been multiple class action lawsuits filed against Ashley Madison and its parent company, Avid Life Media, but these findings could send the figures skyrocketing. If true, it means that just 0.0073% of Ashley Madison’s users were actually women — and that changes the fundamental nature of the site. Ashley Madison wasn’t selling the ability to have an affair for any sane definition of the word. It was selling the fantasy of having an affair. It might not be morality of cheating on one’s spouse that brings the house down, but the perils of false advertising.

Is total honesty a good thing for society?

One issue raised by privacy advocates in the wake of the Ashley Madison hack, and that’s certain to come up again now that we know the overwhelming majority of men were literally incapable of having an affair on Ashley Madison, is whether or not this type of total social disclosure is good for society. Technology allows unparalleled amounts of information to be vacuumed up, from license plate readers to invasive telemetry-gathering in Windows 10.

It’s easy to be distracted by moral superiority in the Ashley Madison case. Cheating on one’s spouse is frowned upon by the overwhelming majority of Americans, including those in non-traditional relationships. Nevertheless, there are guaranteed to be people caught up in the hack that can now be accused of having explored having an affair who had no serious intent to do so. Journalists, researchers, people who created accounts out of curiosity, and those who might have created an account before actually getting married are all potential victims. Such individuals will only be a fraction of the millions of men who signed up on the site, but they exist — and determining who they are will cause a great deal of pain for all involved.

The bigger problem that this hack points out is that all of us have, at one time or another, flirted with doing something we knew we shouldn’t do. That could mean a beer at a strip club with a friend, an hour at a singles bar, or that time we flirted just a little too much with a friend or co-worker. Some of those accounts on Ashley Madison were almost certainly created during times of extreme stress in a relationship when one or both parties were looking for resolutions, considered cheating, and walked away thereafter.

All of us have said things out loud and then been glad no one else heard them. All of us have done things we aren’t proud of. The privacy invasions inherent to so much of modern technology allow for a devastating compilation of these moments in the wrong hands, and could be used to expose huge amounts of personal, embarrassing information about people who have committed no crimes and taken no significant action. Sooner or later, hackers will penetrate one of the huge data clearing houses like Acxiom, or even Microsoft or Google. No one’s security is perfect forever. The ability to track people’s physical location or online activities does not guarantee that such information will be used wisely or prudently.

I have no sympathy for Ashley Madison users who signed up for a service that promised the ability to cheat on one’s spouse, and I suspect few people do. The fact that what these people did was reprehensible, however, shouldn’t be used as a reason to dodge the larger issues that surround the hack itself. Do we want to live in a world where our every action can be subjected to global scrutiny if a third-party company doesn’t perform its due diligence?