Cheating with a Fantasy? - Almost None of the "Women" in the Hacked Ashley Madison Site May Have Ever Been Real

Wow. One data analyst indicates that the VAST majority of women accounts on the cheating website Ashley Madison were fake. Only about 12,000 accounts out of millions could be positively identified as being actual accounts, though likely that is a low number.

It appears that most men were not cheating with a person, but with a mere fantasy. I'm not sure if this makes this more or less tragic. Note the article link and excerpt below.



Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used t...http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-madison-d...

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When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.

Editor’s Note: The number of female users reported in this article are based in part on a misinterpretation of the data. We’ve done a thorough analysis of the source code and offered a new interpretation here.

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile.Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.

When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy . . . .

Is it more or less tragic that most men were apparently cheating with a "fantasy?" What do we learn from this?