Ashley Madison Source Code Shows Evidence They Created Bots To Message Men

An anonymous reader writes: Gizmodo's Annalee Newitz looked through the source code contained in the recent Ashley Madison data dump and found evidence that the company created tens of thousands of bot accounts designed to spur their male users into action by sending them messages. "The code tells the story of a company trying to weave the illusion that women on the site were plentiful and eager." The evidence suggests bots sent over 20 million messages on the website, and chatted with people over 11 million times. The vast majority of fake accounts — 70,529 to 43 — pretended to be female, and the users targeted were almost entirely men. Comments left in the code indicate some of the issues Ashley Madison's engineers had to solve: "randomizing start time so engagers don't all pop up at the same time" and "for every single state that has guest males, we want to have a chat engager." The AI was unsophisticated, though one type of bot would try to convince men to pay and then pass them to a real person.

Comments

Re:How is this legal?

[Narcocide]

No, before you sign up you have to agree to terms of service, and somewhere hidden deep in the fine print is some incredibly vague sentence like "all interactions between users are purely for entertainment purposes only" which, if necessary in a court of law, they can easily construe to mean that the users agreed to be lied to.

Re:exhibit A: OK Cupid's famous essay

[Dr_Barnowl]

The site that bought them, match.com, feels horribly scammy as well.

I've tried four dating websites - two paid, two free.

Paid :

* match.com - vast majority of female profiles dead (filter by last login date and the pool dries up immensely), telltale signs that many of the profiles are bots

I got dates from match, but they weren't really good matches

* elitesingles - just not enough members to justify using it, it's chosen "exclusivity" image works against it

Unpaid :

* plenty of fish - I got dates but it seems the majority of people on here are looking for hookups, not relationships

* OKCupid - the only one I recommend. I gave them money, voluntarily, because I liked their business model. I hope being owned by match.com hasn't messed with that.

I also don't know if it's a cultural thing - match.com mostly had what I'd think of as normal average people (the kind of people I met speed dating), OKCupid was either much better at matching me with people of similar temperament (nerdy girls, basically), or just attracts that kind of crowd.

Met a very lovely woman on OKC and we've been dating for nigh on 18 months now and very much in love. It took a lot of disheartening persistence and slogging though - online dating concentrates the normal feelings of social rejection into a kind of burning vitriol that eats at the soul. But when you have a personality type that's less than 1% of the population it's the smart move - there was just no way I was going to meet enough women to find someone compatible (statistically speaking) in my existing social network.

Re:How is this legal?

[AmiMoJo]

It would never hold up in a UK court, I'm certain of that. T&Cs don't override a reasonable person's expectations of a service.

For example, years ago I sent a package overseas. I paid Royal Mail for tracking and insurance. The package was lost and they couldn't tell me what happened to it. They argued that the T&Cs, which were far too long to read standing at the counter in the post office and were not explained to be by their staff, stated that the tracking stops at the UK border and as such so does the insurance. The judge dismissed their argument immediately, because the service is advertised as being tracked and insured. They would have had to clearly advertise that massive gaping hole prominently if they wanted to enforce it.

I really hope someone does take them to court to get their money back.