Originally Posted by
ToasterOven
Anyone that thinks that the hackers are the good guys would have made an excellent Nazi.
Good guys? No. But if the reports of the $19 "Full Delete" scam are true, then AshleyMadison deserves everything it gets.
The only people deserving of sympathy here are the members who might be outed. One can rationalize that these people deserve to be outed for cheating on their spouses, but that's really their own personal issues, and should not be outed by unrelated third parties simply to punish the company facilitating the hookups. This is especially true because the hackers are supposedly doing this out of outrage about AshleyMadison's customers being cheated, so why hurt those victims again (and much worse) in order to supposedly defend them?
Furthermore, I'm sure some of the members of AshleyMadison are using the site as part of an open marriage arrangement, and it's especially not fair to those people that their names get outed to the public.
If reported by the hackers correctly, the $19 Full Delete thing was an outright scam. It's bad enough that they are charging scared and regretful members $19 to remove their info. This should definitely be free, and is exploitative. This practice isn't much better than those scumbags who put up "arrest records" websites and then extort $200 out of people to have their info removed. But to charge the $19 and not actually fully delete the information as promised is outright fraud.
So if the hackers are simply threatening to post the customer records, with no actual plans to do so, then they aren't that bad.
If they are going to go through with their threat, then they are causing way too much collateral damage, and I agree they could not be considered "good guys".
Of course, it's also possible that this isn't about the $19 Full Delete thing at all, but rather that is being used as an excuse (even a true one) to get revenge upon AshleyMadison for other, less noble reasons.
Does anyone have a link to the article about it possibly being an inside job?