AshleyMadison.com is facing a $578 million class-action lawsuit following the recent hack that has exposed details of everyone to ever register on the site. Two Canadian law firms have filed the suit against Avid Dating Life and Avid Life Media – the Toronto based owners of the website that enables extra-marital affairs, reports Time.
A key omission! Image Credit: brett jordan (Flickr)
Ashley Madison had their databases hacked into last month by ‘The Impact Team’, a hacking group that claim Ashley Madison has been untruthful to customers. Ashley Madison offers a ‘full delete’ option for $19, which supposedly removes any trace of prior registration. The Impact Team claimed they were not deleting the details as promised, and threatened to leak all details unless Ashley Madison went offline.
The site did not bow to the threats, and true to their word, The Impact Team have published customer information online from March 2008 until this year. Approximately 36 million email addresses have been exposed, as well as the customers’ full names, credit card details, address and personal messages.
The two Canadian law firms — Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg LLP — filed the lawsuit on Thursday on behalf of Canadians who are “outraged” that their privacy has been breached.
The firms released a statement saying: “Numerous former users of AshleyMadison.com have approached the law firms to inquire about their privacy rights under Canadian law […] They are outraged that AshleyMadison.com failed to protect its users’ information. In many cases, the users paid an additional fee for the website to remove all of their user data, only to discover that the information was left intact and exposed.”
So far The Impact Team hackers seem exempt from legal action, with just website owners Avid Life Media and Avid Dating Life under fire.
The lawsuit still needs to be certified by the court.
See the full story here.
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