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Abstract
In the summer of 2015, the “cheating website” known as Ashley Madison came under scrutiny, as a group calling itself the Impact Team revealed users’ private information. This case study explores the controversy’s Canadian media coverage and sheds light on the main discourses about intimacy and the Internet that were made visible during this event. It interrogates how cheaters, hackers, and the company were represented. To varying degrees, the mainstream press condemns the cheaters, the hackers, and the company for their behaviour. The article also addresses the ways intimate practices are politicized and commercialized in the digital context, including a discussion of the emphasis on “privacy.” To conclude the article, I discuss the transparency and privacy issues implicated in digital intimacies and the power–knowledge (im)balance implied by hackers’ online anonymity.
Notes
1. Paid delete option: clients could pay a nineteen-dollar fee to have their information completely erased after they quit the website.
2. See, for example, the analysis of its CEO media appearances in Rambukkana (Citation2015) or advertisements like the video “I’m looking for someone other than my wife.”
3. Mississauga is a city in Ontario, Canada.
4. This testimony seems to be the only one that was published in a mainstream newspaper. The woman was on the site to experiment with a form of cheating. There is another article from a female reporter who was on the site for work (Moore). There are testimonials from other women in newspapers from other countries, but my analysis is limited to Canada.