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Ashley Madison, or The Ashley Madison Agency, is a Canadian online dating service and social networking service. It was launched in 2002 and marketed to people who are married (or people in relationships) who are looking for affairs. The website's slogan is "Life is short. Have an affair."The website has been widely condemned for being a "business built on the back of broken hearts", and is also believed to lie about the size of its userbase by "creating fake accounts, or not stopping others from creating fake accounts".Ashley Madison gained notoriety in 2015 when it was subject to a data breach and the personal information of millions of users was released to the public. History Ashley Madison was founded in 2002 by Darren J. Morgenstern. The name comes from two popular female names in North America, "Ashley" and "Madison".On July 15, 2015, hackers stole all of its customer data—including emails, names, home addresses, sexual fantasies, and credit card information—and threatened to post the data online if Ashley Madison and fellow Avid Life Media site Established Men were not permanently closed. By July 22, the first set of customer names was released by hackers, with all of the user data released on August 18, 2015. More data (including some of the CEO's emails) was released on August 20, 2015. The release included data from customers who had previously paid a $19 fee to Ashley Madison to supposedly have their data deleted. The fee was also applied to people who had accounts set up against their will, as a workplace prank, or because of a mistyped email address.On August 28, 2015, Noel Biderman agreed to step down as chief executive officer of Avid Life Media Inc. A statement released by the firm said his departure was "in the best interest of the company".In July 2016, parent company Avid Life Media re-branded itself to Ruby Corp. and appointed Rob Segal as its new CEO. In the same month, the company changed its signature tagline from "Life is Short. Have an Affair." to "Find your moment", and updated its brand imagery to replace the image of a woman wearing a wedding ring with a red gem-shaped symbol as its logo.By 2017, CEO Rob Segal and President James Millership had resigned from their respective roles. In May 2017, Ashley Madison unretired the tagline "Life is short. Have an affair", and the image of the married woman, symbolic of the company's returned focus on married dating. In February 2019, the company announced it had reached the 60-million-member mark. In a 2019 interview, Ashley Madison's Chief Strategy Officer Paul Keable stated that the service helps create up to one million affairs every month. Membership Ashley Madison is a membership website and service based in Canada; its membership includes more than 60 million people in 53 countries.The company announced plans to launch in Singapore in 2014. However, Singapore's Media Development Authority (MDA) announced that it would not allow Ashley Madison to operate in Singapore as "it promotes adultery and disregards family values". Business model Unlike Match.com or eHarmony, Ashley Madison's business model is based on credits rather than monthly subscriptions. For a conversation between two members, one of the members, always the man, must pay eight credits to initiate the conversation. Any follow-up messages between the two members are complimentary after starting communication. Ashley Madison also has a real-time chat feature where credits buy a certain time allotment. The site allows users to hide their account profiles for free. Users looking to delete their accounts, even those made without the individual's consent, are charged a $19 fee. The "full delete" option claims to remove user profiles, all messages sent and received, site usage history, personally identifiable information, and photos. The data disclosures in 2015 revealed that this "permanent deletion" feature did not permanently delete anything, and all data was recoverable. Criticism Trish McDermott, a consultant who helped found Match.com, accused Ashley Madison of being a "business built on the back of broken hearts, ruined marriages, and damaged families". Biderman responded by stating that the site is "just a platform" and a website or a commercial will not convince anyone to commit adultery. According to Biderman, affairs help preserve many marriages. Guarantee Ashley Madison offered a guarantee that users will "find someone": "we GUARANTEE that you will successfully find what you're looking for or we'll give you your money back." To qualify, users had to purchase the most expensive package, send more expensive "priority" messages to 18 unique members each month for three months, send five Ashley Madison gifts per month, and engage in 60 minutes of paid chat per month. Compounding the problem is that "more men than women use the service, with the disparity increasing as they advance in age", and "Men seek sex, while women seek passion." A page on Ashley Madison, entitled "Is Ashley Madison a scam? Is Ashley Madison a fraud?" addressed some of these issues in an attempt to win over prospective customers and teach them best practices for using the site.Segal and Millership phased out the guarantee feature on July 5, 2016. It no longer appears on the company website, advertising, or promotion. Fake female bot accounts According to Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, who has analyzed the 2015 leaked data, Ashley Madison had over 70,000 bots sending fake female messages to male users. She had previously released an analysis purporting to show that only a minuscule proportion (12,000 out of 5.5 million) of registered female accounts were used on a regular basis, but she has subsequently disavowed this analysis, saying that from the data released there is no way of determining how many women actually used the service. Newitz noted a clause in terms of service which states that "many profiles are for 'amusement only'".In 2012, a former employee claimed in a lawsuit that she was requested to create thousands of fake female accounts attractive to male customers, resulting in repetitive stress injury. The case was settled out of court.In July 2016, CEO Rob Segal and newly appointed President James Millership told Reuters that the company had phased out bots by late 2015. Segal shared an independent report by EY (Ernst & Young), which verified the phase-out. Advertising Ashley Madison employs guerrilla marketing techniques to advertise its site. One such technique has been the creation of fake criticism websites filled with ads for Ashley Madison and anonymous testimony that the site is legitimate. For example, the site "AshleyMadisonScams.com" was registered to Ashley Madison's owner, Avid Life.Ashley Madison advertises with TV commercials, billboards, and radio ads by the CEO, Noel Biderman. TV ads have been pulled from the air in some countries after frequent complaints. Some proposals turned down by the companies approached.... Discover the Ashley Deng popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Ashley Deng books.