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“Our marketing guy came up with the idea for a billboard in India – Your parents arranged your marriage. Let us help you with your affair.”
Love and sex might mean a lot of different things to people around the world, but for dating websites, it’s all about monetary profit, and it couldn’t have been truer for “Ashley Madison”, a dating website that was founded in 2002, much before dating websites became the go to place for people to meet their next romantic interest. And just in case you didn’t know, Ashley Madison wasn’t made for singles, but marketed to married people looking to have an affair. “Life is short, have an affair,” was their popular tagline.
So, Netflix’s 2024 documentary series “Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal” looks at the rise of the controversial website and the 2015 data security breach that compromised the private details of millions of its users. The three-part series kicks off with the interview of Evan Back, a former employee of Ashley Madioson, who gleefully jokes about how he’d tell people their website’s biggest competitor was the Bible. While there are few more ex-employee interviews, Evan Back is probably gives the most entertaining insights into the workings of their website and how their former CEO Noel Biderman was the driving strength behind the Ashley Madison’s stellar growth, despite massive criticism and backlash in the media for “encouraging cheating”.
Unfortunately, “Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal” does not feature an interview with Noel Biderman, but it does contain several file footage of his interviews for viewers to understand his vision for the website. It also has a short interview with Marc Morgenstern, the former creative director of Ashley Madison, which was founded by his brother Darren Morgenstern. But the most crucial interviews of course is that of some of the users and their spouses who were affected by the data breach.
While the interviews don’t necessarily flow smoothly through the three episodes, the documentary maintains an engaging structure. It begins with the establishment of the site, follows its growth and the marketing strategies that made it a globally successful, profitable enterprise, and then covers the eventual hacking of the site. The film also details the company’s unsuccessful efforts to protect their customers from being exposed, the subsequent fallout, and the lawsuits the company faced for failing to protect its users’ data. It’s like a tragic-comedy case, comical to those who were unaffected by it and thought the “cheaters” had it coming, while many users and their families faced tragic consequences.
Other interviews in “Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal” include journalists who covered the case, data security experts hired by Ashley Madison to identify the hackers, and a police officer who worked on the case. The data breach didn’t simply expose the users having extramarital affairs through the site, but further digging into the data by various journalists also lead to lot more surprising (or not so surprising) details about the inner-working of the website and how its users were actively being misled into losing money.
Unlike some other Netflix documentaries, “Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal” manages to present multiple perspectives, making it an interesting case study on the ethics of hacking, infidelity, and the murky boundaries of online privacy.
Rating: 6.5/10. You can stream the docu-series on “Netflix”.
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