Not really.

The whole issue wouldn't exist without the unfaithful, whether any affair comes to light or not is irrelevant to that aspect. It's like any other trespassing, misdemeanor or crime, whether the perpetrator gets indicted or punished has exactly zero bearing on the wrongdoing itself.

while i don't disagree with what you say. i wonder if over time this means that society will become more forgiving of this stuff knowing it is out there for everyone.

It's a great point. Whether it's good or bad only the future will tell of course

Two people commit suicide with suspected reason being Ashley Maddison leak:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...y-madison-hack

Germany has a suicide rate of 19 per 100'000 per year (swiss suicide rate is among highest worldwide so unsuitable here). With 33mln people involved, there will be more than 6000 suicides among them this year, more than 120 every weak, 17 every day.

Statistically speaking there should have been many many more already.

I am not sure what is more annoying, my wife finding out about my account on Ashley Maddison or finding out about my wife's account on Ashley Maddison!

My wife is hopping mad

Fascinating. Can you update us with Germany's suicide rate because of information release concerning adultery websites, which would be the actual statistic you would base any prediction on.
Thanks.

Perhaps Germans don't really care if their spouses find out (compared with North Americans, for example)?

You need a lot more information than suicide rates to make such a call on the number of suicides.

Relatively naive/idealistic way of putting things, don't you think?

Many people sign up for this kind of thing knowing it is "wrong", otherwise why do it in secret?

Partially, I believe, because there is a certain *ahem* excitement about doing something illicitly... well I guess that was a wake-up call. We are always trained to assume that all emails are public property, well, for the internet I would always assume that my information (what is out there anyway) will be accessed by someone at sometime. Though what they'll do with it, who knows. It is one of the reasons that I don't really use cloud services to store data.

Maybe it might help people grow up? As a society, I don't think we do that well in terms of ethics & morals. But as always, you only see the very worst. Given that there are over 7 bn people on the planet what you see on the internet is the very worst (& best) on offer. So a potential bias there.

Although I take your point re revenge porn etc., I have little sympathy for self-inflicted idiocy and the constant need to share your thoughts. For example, any news report now has to have the obligatory "tweets" from a couple random people who know nothing about the topic but have an opinion anyway.

But to bastardise a well-known truism, maybe "we get the internet we deserve"?

Sorry, Urs, but that is completely irrelevant - you are making a point that this hack hasn't lead to a statistically significant increase in suicides. It would be unlikely to affect the national suicide rates, and even if it did, so what? It is irrelevant.

The point made by news feeds was that suicides had been linked to this hack.

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Never let right or wrong get in the way of a good opinion

And you're posting that on a forum??

Errr... yes?

So who's on Ashley Madison, what's it like?

If hackers ever managed to crack 'Google Incognito', I'm sure there would be a lot more suicides

Of the 33 million people on the list, 70 have been killed in car accidents in the past week. (Given a USA car death rate of 11.6/100000 people per year). To put it another way - the deaths of 70 people in fatal accidents have been linked to the Ashley Madison hack. You'd have to be an utter pillock to think that those 70 deaths had anything to do with the hack.

But replace 70 with 2, and "killed in car accidents" with "suicide", and suddenly " the hackers have blood on their hands ".

Unless it can be shown that among the 33 million people there have been statistically significantly more suicides than in the general population, then it simply cannot be determined if the hackers have caused lethal harm.

What's to hack? It only doesn't leave a footprint on your computer. But the router logs, your ISP's logs lay bare all your naughty secrets.

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Down with racism. Long live miscegenation!

Neither. Most annoying is the fact you were both looking forward to a hot night of passion with an internet stranger and ended up meeting each other.

...or... if they left a note saying it was because of this?

Agree and disagree.

You need to make like for like comparisons - is the suicide rate post AM hack higher or lower than before the hack? And how does it compare to that of the overall population?

It could be possible that members of AM were lower suicide risks than the rest of the population - and therefore 2 in a short period may be a big jump. On the flipside it could be they were of a higher risk - and that the hack allowed them to come clean, be forgiven and move forward - reducing the number of suicides.

A statistic is meaningless without comparison - and it is risky to apply overall rates to a subet of data.

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"Don't believe everything you read on the internet" Abraham Lincoln

Sorry, I should have been more explicit.

The low number of incidents vs what should be expected from a pure numbers perspective (though Tom does indeed have a point here, 20-50 year old males [80% of AM customers are male] may differ sigificantly from the raw male average I used), should give reason to pause.

Correlation isn't proof of causation.

I think the core demographic of Ashley Madison is deeply unhappy people, who perhaps feel trapped, unloved, unfulfilled etc... therefore already more inclined to suicide than your average happily married individual.