Looks like the numbers were even more abysmal. There were about 37 million members total with 31.5 million being men and 5.5 million being women, but the reality of the numbers is worst.
TLDR; Less than 1% of women ever showed any activity the day after creating their account.
http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-o ... database-1725558944
In the profile database, each Ashley Madison member has a number of data fields, including obvious things like nickname, gender, birthday, and turn-ons; but the member profile also contains data that is purely for administrative use, like the email address used to create the account, and when the person last checked their Ashley Madison inbox.
Were there any patterns in the personal email addresses that people listed when they signed up? I figured that if I were an admin at Ashley Madison creating fake profiles, I would use ashleymadison.com for the email addresses because it’s easy and obvious. No real Ashley Madison customer would have an Ashley Madison company email. So I searched for any email address that ended in ashleymadison.com. Bingo. There were about 10 thousand accounts with ashleymadison.com email addresses. Many of them sounded like they’d been generated by a bot, like the dozens of addresses listed as 100@ashleymadison.com, 200@ashleymadison.com, 300@ashleymadison, and so on.
What it suggests is that the majority of obviously fake accounts — ones perhaps created by bored admins using their company’s email address, or maybe real women using fake information — were marked female.
The second most popular IP address, found in 80,805 profiles, was a different story. This IP address, 127.0.0.1, is well-known to anyone who works with computer systems as a loopback interface. To the rest of us, it’s known simply as “home,” your local computer. Any account with that IP address was likely created on a “home” computer at Ashley Madison. Interestingly, 68,709 of the profiles created with that IP address were female.
That’s a huge disparity. In a database of 85% men, you’d expect any IP address to belong to about 85% men. So it’s remarkable to discover that about 82% of the accounts created from a “home” IP address are female. This strengthened the pattern I’d already seen with the ashleymadison.com email addresses — obviously fake accounts were overwhelmingly female, and numbered in the tens of thousands.
Another weird detail was that the most popular female last name in the database was an extremely unusual one, which matched the name of a woman who worked at the company about ten years ago. This unusual name had over 350 entries, as if she or someone else was creating a bunch of test accounts.
Then, three data fields changed everything. The first field, called mail_last_time, contained a timestamp indicating the last time a member checked the messages in their Ashley Madison inbox. If a person never checked their inbox, the field was blank. But even if they’d checked their messages only once, the field contained a date and time. About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages. It was a serious anomaly.
The pattern was reflected in another data field, too. This one, called chat_last_time contained the timestamp for the last time a member had struck up a conversation using the Ashley Madison chat system. Roughly 11 million men had engaged in chat, but only 2400 women had.
Yet another field, reply_mail_last_time, showed a similar disparity. This field contained the time when a member had last replied to a message from another person on Ashley Madison. 5.9 million men had done it, and only 9700 women had.
What all these fields have in common is that they measure user activity. They show what happened after the account profile was created, and how an actual person used it by checking messages, chatting, or replying to messages. They measure what you might call signatures of real human behavior. Only a paltry number of women’s accounts actually looked human.
Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created. | |
