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

Posted by Soulskill on from the do-androids-cheat-on-electric-sheep? dept.

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.

9 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. How is this legal? by SoCalChris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How is this legal? Tricking people into paying for accounts by convincing them that someone is trying to message them would be fraud, wouldn't it?

    1. Re:How is this legal? by Narcocide · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:How is this legal? by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative
      You're right. They warn that some parts of their website are for entertainment only. Here are the terms and conditions, and the relevant portion reproduced below:

      Other Aspects of the Ashley Madison Service – For Your Entertainment

      Our Site and our Service gives users the opportunity to explore their fantasies and to interact with others in the Site. However, there is no guarantee you will find a date or partner on our Site or using our Service. Our Site and our Service also is geared to provide you with amusement and entertainment. You agree that some of the features of our Site and our Service are intended to provide entertainment.

      Others Using the Site for Entertainment

      You also understand and agree that there are users and members on the Site that use and subscribe to our Service for purely entertainment purposes. Those users and subscribers are not seeking physical meetings with anyone they meet on the Service, but consider their communications with users and members to be for their amusement.

      You acknowledge and agree that any profiles of users and members, as well as, communications from such persons may not be true, accurate or authentic and may be exaggerated or fantasy. You acknowledge and understand that you may be communicating with such persons and that we are not responsible for such communications.

      Of course, in another section the prohibit you from using bots, and in another section, prohibit you from using fake profile pictures. So the only ones who could be doing these things..............

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:How is this legal? by JMJimmy · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's not, but up to the hack they strictly obeyed to the 11th commandments ("Thou shall not get caught").

      But, how do you want to prove it; you can't use the hacked data ("Fruit of the poisonous tree")...

      "Poison tree" argument also doesn't apply to Canadian law. Courts regularly use "poisoned" evidence here. That said, there's no case because they include this clause in their terms:

      Other Aspects of the Ashley Madison Service – For Your Entertainment

      Our Site and our Service gives users the opportunity to explore their fantasies and to interact with others in the Site. However, there is no guarantee you will find a date or partner on our Site or using our Service. Our Site and our Service also is geared to provide you with amusement and entertainment. You agree that some of the features of our Site and our Service are intended to provide entertainment.

      In Canadian law as long as you disclose that it's for entertainment purposes only you can get away with a lot more. It's how psychic/erotic phone lines and such get around laws that would otherwise make it illegal.

    4. Re:How is this legal? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Turing Test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It would be amusing if the first bot to pass a turing test is from a dating website rather than a university.

  3. The bots are real and will message anything by Sarusa · · Score: 5, Informative

    KFI morning host Bill Handel created an Ashley Madison account:

            handle: smallpenis640
            weight: 220
            height: 4'4"
            picture: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

    He had 3 interested 'women' messaging him in under an hour. And of course you have to pay to message back. This is where most of their money comes from.

    Not sure what happened after that, but yeah, AM, all those 'real women' that 'really' use your site.

  4. exhibit A: OK Cupid's famous essay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    As OK Cupid pointed out, you should never pay for ANY online dating., The economic model is against you. http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating.html

    Soon after publishing that famous essay the site was bought by a paid for dating site: it remains free, but had to take that essay down (this is a cached version)

    I met my wife on OK Cupid, and her anecdotal experience confirms that paid for sites are the pits. On paid for sites she was always being hassled by obnoxious men, but free sites (POF, OKC) are much quicker to delete bad accounts. Dating sites get most of their money from desperate men paying large amounts every month. It's easy to keep them coming via fake female accounts. Even large "reputable" companies do it, and have been caught out on TV shows. Heck you can check it yourself: sign up for a paid for dating site, put the photos into Google image search, and see how long it takes before you get a fake. But sexual desperation is such that men will still go there,

    1. Re:exhibit A: OK Cupid's famous essay by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.