Does Ashley Madison Work for You?

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Ashley Madisonturteltaub-adam-200x200-150x150By Adam Turteltaub
adam.turteltaub@corporatecompliance.org

The latest cyber breach grabbing headlines is sending chills down millions of spines.  The victims aren’t afraid of anything as mundane as having their credit card data made public.  They’re terrified that their spouses will find out that they’ve been cheating on them.  The site breached, ashleymadison.com, is in the business of facilitating infidelity.  Reports are that nearly 40 million of their member records are now available.

According to Statista there are (or were before this happened) about 60 million married couples in the US.  You don’t have to do too much math to see that a very significant percentage of people are willing to cheat, or are willing to have sex with others who are cheating.

The repercussions are already significant, with divorce lawyers expecting a mini boom in the market.  And there will likely be career implications as well.  According to an AP report, many government employees seem to have been using the site, including a division chief at the Department of Justice.  In addition adultery is a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, meaning some people may face more than embarrassment and the loss of a job.

So what does it mean for the compliance and ethics community?  For one, it’s a good reminder that your organization’s data is a prime target.

Second, given the sheer number of users of the site, it’s safe to say that the vast majority of companies in this country have users of the site working for them.

That should be a wake up call for everyone who ever resisted a compliance program on the premise that “we have good people” or that “our people know the difference between right and wrong.”

Clearly a lot of people don’t know the difference, or don’t care, at least when it comes to adultery.

Many will likely say, “Well, that’s more of a personal matter, not a business one.”  And while it’s strictly true, I don’t think there is a switch in our brains that changes our ethics the moment we walk into the office.  Further, the number of users of Ashley Madison who accessed the site from work shows that there is less of a difference between personal and business than many would think.

This whole, sordid incident is a reminder that no matter how good an ethics and compliance program is, there will always be people willing to cheat, whether in their marriage or elsewhere.

[bctt tweet=”Simply teaching people right and wrong is no guarantee that they will do what is right @AdamTurteltaub” via=”no”]

Simply teaching people right and wrong is no guarantee that they will do what is right.  And, no matter how good we may think our people are, at least some of them are far from being as good as we think.

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5 COMMENTS

  1. I suppose one of the sordid aspects of this issue is the fact that the site makes affairs so premeditated vs. a single moment of passionate forgetfulness. I wonder how well such intent reflects in one’s character.

  2. My thoughts exactly. I have said time and time again, the politicians don’t follow their laws on ethics why should we vote for them, but it seems that we have become more acceptable of poor behavior. Here is a prime example of morals gone wrong.

  3. Hate to say it, but it’s not just the politicians. It’s a heck of a lot of us, which is an argument for not expecting the ethics level to be as high as we would like.

  4. How do we determine what is ethical. I know statistics can be used to prove either side but if there are 60 million married couples in the US and there were 40 million records that were compromised then you could roughly say that two thirds or well over a majority approve of adultery. So, is adultery unethical??? I say yes but feel I may be in the minority.

  5. Part of what makes a good compliance and ethics professional is moral imagination, both positive and negative: being able to imagine how a normal, decent person might see a flaw in a control and be willing to take advantage of it; seeing how a person who went into marriage with perfectly good motives might be led, through circumstance rather than lack of virtue, to cheat on their spouse. All the “tut-tut”ing I keep hearing from compliance folk about the Ashley Madison issue suggests they might lack this moral imagination. Ethics is much more complicated, and people are much more complicated (and marriage, well, that’s astronomically complicated…) than it might seem. The behavioral ethics research suggests that almost everybody is willing to cheat (to a greater or lesser degree), so the idea that runs through much of this discussion, that because a person would cheat on their spouse makes them ipso facto a person that can’t be trusted, is both factually incorrect and unattractively self-righteous.

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