Parents' Guide to The Ashley Madison Affair

This docuseries offers an interesting account of the rise of Ashley Madison and its corporate success without much sympathy for its clientele. In The Ashley Madison Project, Biderman is characterized as a man who brashly promotes infidelity as a successful business venture. He's helped by infamous advertisements that frame the company's services as a potential solution to dysfunctional relationships. Conversations about the ruination caused by the extramarital activities of its subscribers are also had. As a result, it's difficult to feel any real sympathy for the company and its clients, despite the fact that they are victims of a very serious and frightening criminal cyberattack. It's also hard to feel too concerned about members of the Ashley Madison community who paid for guaranteed anonymity, and who were duped into believing that the women with whom men were socializing with online were mostly bots instead of actual human beings.

Nonetheless, The Ashley Madison Affair argues that the media frenzy surrounding government workers and celebs who appeared on the site's subscriber list (including 19 Kids and Counting's Josh Duggar's membership) made it easy to ignore just how serious the crimes committed against the company were. The salacious coverage made it permissible to villainize people whose names were on the infamous list, despite not knowing why they were on it or if they were active on the site in any way, which sometimes led to tragic outcomes. No doubt that watching this series will prompt a lot of conversations about the morality of infidelity and the role the tech industry is playing in it. But it also offers a real-life lesson about the fact that nothing on the Internet will ever truly be private, and that whatever you put online can always have real world consequences.