Metadata in times of love, lust and technology reads a 'fling'

The massive security hack of Ashley Madison, the cheating website, is a big example of how technology and personal lives, when intermingled, don’t get much importance in the algorithm world, which is the other way round in the social system around us (read society).

Regardless of judging someone on morality grounds, it is about understanding what it means to be single, or married and looking for love in the time of complicated algorithms.

The data crunchers will tell you that over one-third of America’s 90 million internet users will be busy dabbling with their online dating profile every month, at any given point of time.

The numbers are huge and so is the impact. It’s literally a ‘love marketplace’ that’s getting into shape out there.

The big data analytics is helping online dating sites to find near-to-perfect matches for their users by sifting through answers fed to large repository of questions they pose.

Love is selling like hot pancakes. Because satisfied customers who find their mates, means big business for the site, and boosts the revenue. Juniper Research predicts the segment, which is growing alongside e-Commerce with love (or lust) as its main commodity, was just $1bn in 2011, and will more than double at $2.3bn in 2016.

Online matrimony, online dating and online seekers are a class apart. But, Ashley Madison did something phenomenal at a time when internet was on the course of correction, vis-à-vis, existing social values. It was a loud and risky call that almost sounded like a clarion declaration. “Life is short, have an affair”.

The bait didn’t require to be well worded. A lot of people fell for this six word tagline that may have seemed like a hippie rant. Ashley Madison became popular in no time. Founded in 2001, Ashley Madison has over 37 million users worldwide and the numbers are growing, despite the hacking and subsequent incidents.

A hacker group calling itself the Impact Team hacked the site and obtained the user details. When AM noticed it, there was hardly any reaction from the site. The hackers went on to make the profiles public and this did lead to some sort of a chaotic situation where people ended lives, for a potential reason of their ‘seeking’ becoming public.

Families suffered because of this, and those who stepped out of the boundaries have been going through hell as well. AM hack has offered a lifetime opportunity for divorce attorneys and lawyers who specialize in cases of separation and child custody. Courts will soon brim with cases that stem out of this fiasco.

But this is something that has a social implication than the technological one. The fact is that AM continues to grow, as per the admission of its own spokespersons and other sites such as Tinder, OKCupid etc still get a rush of users is somewhat a complicated situation.

Statistics reveal nearly 57% of Americans have a close family member or a friend who uses online dating to find a partner. And nearly 40% know of families which have come into existence because of online dating, as in, a lot of people have met their partners online.

The most wonderful yet puzzling fact is that nearly 11% of Americans have stayed with each other for over a decade after having married someone they met online. Now, does this mean that algorithms and data matching is much better when done using technology, than sitting at a local pub and wait for a girl or boy of your choice to surface from somewhere?

But a serious contradiction is in store too. Not everyone believes in the internet, especially pertaining to a person. More than half of Americans feel that people who use online sites to find dates are desperate. And that someone has seriously misrepresented himself or herself on the site, just to get from point A to point B in a relationship.

One-third of online dating services users have felt harassed by someone who contacted them through a site that precisely caters to the need of finding a date.

So, here the bad news is though there is some amount of mistrust on online dating sites, it is gradually dwindling. The number of people who didn’t place too much trust on technology reduced to 21% in 2013, as against 29% in 2005.

Despite the wondrous job done by technology, there are times when algorithms aren’t able to read much more than what a person has to tell.

(Image: Thinkstock)