Late Sunday night, Ashley Madison, a website that helps married people cheat, was hacked by a group calling itself The Impact Team. Hackers claim to have gained access to user data including: “customers’ secret sexual fantasies,” “nude pictures and conversations,” “credit card transactions” with real names and addresses.
In the near future, the Impact Team promised, they’d post all that dirt online. But the fact that hackers got access to this information is far less scary than their proclaimed reason for going after Ashley Madison: In a manifesto reported by Krebs on Security, Impact Team alleges the site stored compromising, personal data on its users even after charging them to delete their accounts.
That, more than anything, would seem to prove the immortality of our online sins: There’s no erasing the digital past. It can only — precariously — be reined in. A number of companies provide no way to delete your accounts at all: among them, Netflix, YouTube, Pinterest, Kik, WordPress and Wikipedia. The Associated Press
