The lead plaintiff in the suit, filed by the law firms Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg LLP, is a disabled Ottawa widower. Its slogan is “Life is short”. “I have been the biggest hypocrite ever”, he said in a statement.
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According to Dore, he only created an account for “opposition research” to dig up dirt on his political rivals.
The suit is waiting to be certified as a class action by Ontario courts.
The names of business people, a politician, civil servants and academics were among the thousands of Irish people who had details of their alleged accounts exposed after the Ashley Madison website was hacked and details published online.
Ashley Madison is still operating, but traffic on the website dropped 40 percent in July when the hackers first threatened to release data unless the website was shut down. The data breach includes users’ personal names, emails, home addresses and message history. Earlier this month, the information was posted online for public viewing.
Joel Eriksson, the chief technology officer for Toronto cyber-security company Cycura, says that, “a list of email addresses is not proof of anyone’s membership”. The company appears to have retained date of birth, city, state, postcode, country and gender of its former customers, plus information about their relationship status, what they were open to sexually, and what they were looking for in a partner.
The hackers were said to be a protest over the site charging a leavers fee to users to completely delete all their data which the impact team said was never removed. “They had the privacy standards they’re expected to adhere to in order to safeguard people’s information”, Robins said.
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Eighty-eight email addresses tied to government agencies that conduct business in New Jersey were part of the massive Ashley Madison leak, a NJ Advance Media analysis has found.
