I kind of look at it like "the truth is an ultimate defence". Simply exposing that truth shouldn't be a problem... the guy actually did it, he was just hoping for it to be kept quiet. Now, if you go and badger and harass the guy to the point where it's the harassment that put them over the edge, then I could see how you'd be held to blame.
Well, let's look at it this way. It's well established that divorce/marital breakdown is a significant risk factor for suicide for men. If a woman divorces her husband, would anyone even think of holding her liable - in civil or criminal court - if he later commits suicide? I think we can safely answer no to that question, notwithstanding some depraved circumstances which would constitute other criminal charges (i.e. blackmailing). This doesn't seem fundamentally different from me going to tell a friend that I know their SO cheated on them, even if I learned that information through illegal means. I'm not aware of any aspect of law that allows someone to be held liable for another's suicide, except in the case of medical malpractice, but I'd be interested to see if there are any cases. I'm sure there are cases of blackmailing, making threats, libel, etc. that have lead to someone's suicide for which someone has been found liable in some way, but it's not the fact of someone's suicide that makes those behaviours illegal.
So I kind of changed my post after you posted that, so it looks weird. It's interesting. In this story, the girl was charged with involuntary manslaughter but a google search doesn't tell me if she's been found guilty yet. I think a key difference is that, with this case, she intentionally and knowingly counselled someone to commit suicide. You can't really say that the Ashley Madison hackers did the same. A big confounding factor is that newspapers don't report on suicides unless it's somehow specifically newsworthy because of the risk of copycat suicides, so it's not like there would be many news stories even they did happen. Also, a little blurb on medical liability in suicides: http://www.currentpsychiatry.com/ho...suicide/0aca64944eb34e9314d1ee5300a3fe00.html
It's an ongoing case playing out right now, so evidence is still being introduced. And it's the same thing a seeing someone on a bridge or rooftop and yelling at them to jump; you can get in serious shit for it. I just think it's kind of shitty for the cops to allude that the hackers are responsible for the suicides, when they're not, really.
So, this guy was actually found guilty for encouraging suicides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Melchert-Dinkel but he was ultimately charged under a law that forbade assisting suicide, but the initial conviction was overturned for the following reason: You can read the article for more details if you want. I guess the distinction between encouraging/advising and assisting has to do with the finer points of how it's done. He was charged with attempting to assist in one suicide because he told a girl to hang herself but she wound up jumping off of a bridge. It's also kind of horrifying how common it is for people to see someone up on a ledge and yell at them to jump. This has been a delightfully morbid diversion away from the actual thread's topic.
If being caught cheating is something that would affect a person's life so significantly that they would want to end it, then going down that road in the first place is pretty damn stupid. On the other hand, I'm fully aware that there are situations where a person is in a marriage where love and/or sex is being withheld permanently and they are starving for some connection. I know of at least two dudes that I would not have judged at all for being on that site, although they weren't that I know of. So thinking about people like them being exposed makes me sad. But what I'm truly worried about is someone being found out that would decide that suicide is not enough. I would not be surprised if there is at least one dude who takes his family with him.
http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-madison-database-1725558944 31 million men, 5.5 million women users. 90 to 95 percent of the women accounts were fake. WOW. Then there is this Still, there is a clause in the Ashley Madison terms of service that notes that “some” people are using the site purely “for entertainment” and that they are “not seeking in person meetings with anyone they meet on the Service, but consider their communications with users and Members to be for their amusement.” The site stops short of saying these are fake people, but does admit that many profiles are for “amusement only.” So basically they were just taking money from lonely men.
I can't believe the part where you had to PAY to CANCEL. That is some ridiculous shit. Yeah that is fucking sad and pathetic. That company is donezo for sure. The fantasy has been burned to the ground with this info.
Some more interesting stuff coming out: http://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924 Basically, they were developing and using bots to pretend and lead on the men on the site. (Is anyone really surprised?) What is surprising, to me, anyway, is the scope and effectiveness of those bots. The data dump shows no "real" woman to man communication, but tens of millions of bot-driven communications to men. Surely there's something illegal about this, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I'm curious what the ramifications of this will be on the other "regular" dating sites. Are they all going to now be expected to somehow prove they don't have bots roaming around?
For comparison, tinder has tons of spam-bots targeting men. They usually just try to scam your e-mail/phone number or get you to visit a cam-girl or escort. Tinder is free but you can choose to pay for it for a few extra features (such as the ability to swipe right on even more spam-bots, and to swipe right on spam-bots in different cities). But ou usually find out in a few seconds if it's a bot and it's not as though men are paying good money for the chance to interact more with a bot. An interesting question if it constitutes fraud, though. And if the vast majority of "female" members were bots (or journalists digging for a story, or whatever) it kind of explains why the privacy of all these high-profile members was never compromised before this hack - because they were rarely if ever meeting any actual women from the website. I really hadn't heard much about Ashley Madison in terms of user experience. Most dating websites have reputations, but I'd never heard anyone say anything, good or about, about the experience. I guess that's because nobody wants to tell their friends that they paid good money to subscribe to a website specifically meant for having affairs, and worse, that it was full of spam-bots.