Do you remember the Ashley Madison scandal that plagued the online community in 2015? You should, as it spent a decent amount of time getting headlined in the media.
Literally millions of users that signed up for the online affair website were left compromised after one of the larger data breaches in web history.
It turned out that secret affairs don’t always end up secret in the end.
“The group [behind Ashley Madison data leak] has claimed two motivations: First, they’ve criticized Ashley Madison’s core mission of arranging affairs between married individuals.
Second, they’ve attacked Ashley Madison’s business practices, in particular its requirement that users pay $19 for the privilege of deleting all their data from the site (but, as it turns out, not all data was scrubbed).”
Ashley Madison’s parent company, Ruby Corp. & Ruby Life, has been battling a very large amount of lawsuits since the data breach.
In fact just recently a proposed settlement was finally reached. This solved a good amount of relevant lawsuits in the process.
The ordeal left more than 37 million users exposed – so it’s not necessarily a surprise that the class action lawsuits won out in the end. The real surprise is the amount of money being offered to the settlement fund.
The agreed amount: $11.2 million USD.
“If the proposed settlement agreement is approved by the Court, ruby will contribute a total of $11.2 million USD to a settlement fund, which will provide, among other things, payments to settlement class members who submit valid claims for alleged losses resulting from the data breach and alleged misrepresentations as described further in the proposed settlement agreement.”
Individual victims of the data breach can also claim up to $3,500 if they submit proof of their loss. In conclusion, let’s just hope this settlement doesn’t glorify affairs (as Ashley Madison has done that enough on its own).
