The Ethics of Publishing the Ashley Madison Database
Another episode completed for my Ethics in Journalism class at NYU. Natalia Borecki, Jill Neilsen and I wrote and produced this episode. I also edited the episode.
It has been almost eight years since the data breach and little is known about the perpetrators of the attack or their true motivations. On July 2015, a hacker or group of hackers calling themselves “The Impact Team” stole the user data from the Ashley Madison website. They then contacted Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, demanding they shut down Ashley Madison and its sister site, Established Men, in one month or all customer information would be released.
The events surrounding the hack and the release of information was certainly news worthy and should have reported but did journalists go too far by reporting on how to find and download the data, even though that data was freely available on the internet? We try to provide context and answer this question.