And it begins: Ashley Madison bonk-seekers urged to lawyer up It's been barely 48 hours since the Ashley Madison database of millions of fling-seekers was leaked online, and already the lawsuits are flying. Canadian legal eagles* working at Charney Lawyers and fellow practice Sutts, Strosberg LLP will sue fellow Canuck company Ashley Madison over the security and privacy breach. For the …
In most class actions, the plaintiffs actually get the bulk of the reward. It's just that there are often thousands, in some cases millions of them.
So the lawyer - who gets 5% or 10% or whatever - makes a lot more than any individual plaintiff. And yes, if that's 5% of a 5-billion damage award, that's a lot more than you need to buy a yacht.
Both the law firms in this story, however, are Ontario law firms. In Ontario, being paid a percentage of the settlement or judgment is illegal under Law Society rules. They have to charge a fixed fee. That fee will probably be fairly high but the plaintiffs, if they win, are going to get most of the proceeds.
If they lose, it's a problem.
"your information will be held in strict confidence." Odd, that's what Ashley Madison used to say, too.
Maybe you missed that in your enthusiasm to get a pun in, but there is a vast difference between a company promising to keep your info safe and not putting much effort into it and an entity which has a professional and legal obligation to protect your info written into law, in a country that still has a degree of privacy protection left.
"What would happen with subscrtibers to AM that live in states or countries where adultery is illegal ?
Please go directly to jail, do not collect 200$ ?"
I don't know, what is the penalty for joining a website where the members almost certainly didn't commit adultery, since it was 90+% men? Guns are illegal in this country, but if I join a website for gun owners that doesn't mean I have one.
Attempted criminal acts are usually criminal too. You can be prosecuted for attempted murder just fine, even if you didn't succeed.
This isn't going to be much of a problem in this case though, looking at the map I don't see too many of the countries which still treat adultery as criminal in red.
...I say good luck trying to sue Ashley Madison.
Perhaps by the time judgment is given the administrators/liquidators will still have some stationary or AM-branded T-shirts left to hand out as compensation.
(and that is without the other jurisdictional difficulties in trying to sue if you are not based in Canada)
Maybe AM has some kind of anti-sue insurance, in which case there'll be extra gravy for everyone eh?
Might also be an opportunity for some of our less fortunate brethren to contact the wealthier exposees and offer to take the rap for them - for a good price of course?
No unbelievable research claims necessary either.
Bingo.
That is exactly what this case needed, a clearly unimpeachable example of someone who did no wrong and who was wronged.
Obviously, there were (are ?) cheaters on ALM, but nobody can blame a widower for trying to hook up. He is the ideal poster-figure for a lawsuit.
In other matters, women now make up 14% of ALM members ? Curious, yesterday it was 5%.
Funny, that.
@Pascal Monet
Well, yeah - any women looking for extra marital bouncey bouncey now all know pretty much nobody on the site will turn them down, no matter what aesthetic difficulties they posess.
"Well Timmy, it's this or nothing, so get your game face on and get in there"
I wonder how damning you being in the database actually is.
Couldn't virtually anyone just type in someone's email address, set a password and get them signed up for AM? Even if you don't confirm the email address (as most sites want you to these days - although I don't know about AM) it's going to be stored somewhere pending confirmation. I don't know if the breach includes the data required to filter those "unconfirmed" accounts out.
But, presumably, you could be in this data, even if you never signed up?
Surely a massive, bankrupting class-action payout, regardless of who gets what out of it, is the best thing we could all hope for. Finally, it might just send the message to all the other millions of corporate morons that this security of information thing might actually be important.
Ashley Madison's closest kept secret seems to have been the male (95%)/female(5%) ratio of their subscriber base. Either those 5% are awfully busy (!!!), or there are a lot of unsatisfied men paying money in the hopes that one of those 5% will pick them. Now, how many of the 5% are "women of negotiable affection" has yet to be determined...
Some sociology postgrad is going to mine this database for all it's worth and get a PhD out of all this.
The Loon is the official bird of Ontario, a province of Canada, not the official bird of Canada, yet.
But the Loon is a great representation of Canada, it's even on the dollar coin.
The first choice for the dollar was an image celebrating French history. When the bureaucrats responsible for handling the dies "lost" them a new image was needed. So they selected the Provincial Bird of Ontario.
That 's Canadian.
Ontario and Quebec believe they are Canada. They have many justifications, they have the most population, they were the Colony called Canada, they know what is best for everyone and of course they are the "real" Canada, the "real" Canadians, the founding Nations. It certainly never occurred to them to use anything other than an image selected, approved and pleasing to those who consider themselves Canada, making the Loon a natural choice.
The Loon is a excellent representation, not so much because it is a big bird, a great ducker and diver but because it, Ontario's bird, got put on our money by "real" Canadians while all the rest of Canada make fun of it by calling it the Loonie.
And they still think most of Canada is laughing with them and that the Loon should be Canada's national bird, after all Ontario is Canada, at least to those in Ontario.
People in Ontario make fun of the dollar coin by calling it the loonie as well.
The loonie, you may recall, was brought in by the Mulroney government, which wasn't terribly popular. It began to be seen as a symbol of everything he did wrong.
(I've lived in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario & B.C. They all say loonie. Even anglo Quebecers say loonie.)
Why would anyone use their real name and address on a site like this? And, conversely, surely the email addresses *are* real, or AM couldn't send notifications/whatever to members?
The only personally identifiable data would be a name on a credit card, which is hardly unique, and possibly the last 4 digits of the CC number, which seems to be in the database. So, on the face of it, the database seems close to useless, unless you can match a name on a CC with an email address.
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