Goodness Doesn’t Help

Here's a scary thought for those of you with insufficient anxiety: Secrets about you may be revealed even if you don't have secrets.

How is this possible?

It's yet another delightful aspect of the internet, of course.

The following paragraph can be found near the end of a press release issued last week by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada about an investigation of the Ashley Madison fool-around website data breach that it conducted along with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

"The investigation also found the company failed to adequately ensure the accuracy of customer email addresses it held — an issue that resulted in the email addresses of people who had never actually signed up for Ashley Madison being included in the databases published online following the breach."

Yup. You could be totally faithful and still be outed as an adulterer.

This is great news for cheaters who can say they have no idea how their names got into that database.

It's not so great news for non-cheaters who can say the same thing but won't be believed.

I had a few other questions after reading about this investigation.

You probably wondered the same thing I did when I first saw this: What the heck are Canada and Australia doing together?

Is there some sort of relationship here?

Could those two have met on Ashley Madison?

I can't decide if I'm disgusted or impressed.

Then there's this: "Investigators found that at the time of the breach, the home page of the Ashley Madison website included various trustmarks suggesting a high level of security, including a medal icon labeled 'trusted security award.' ALM officials later admitted the trustmark was their own fabrication and removed it."

It looked like this:

Clearly proof of security and discretion.

If you can't trust an adulterers' website, who can you trust?

Since we're dealing with the topic of interesting and perhaps unexpected relationships, you may want to check out a ruling last week from a California Court of Appeal called Phillips v. Campbell, in which the court said a trier of fact can decide whether parties had a dating relationship even if neither of them thought so.

Really. It says that in the very first paragraph.

You could be in a relationship and you don't know it.

Love is weird — and it gets weirder. This appears later in the ruling:

"Although there is no evidence that the parties had sexual relations, appellant admitted that in December 2012 he had sent nude photographs of himself to respondent. ... Appellant, however, stated to the court that '[t]here was nothing inappropriate about' the photographs, which had been taken when he 'was nude modeling.'"

If you've got a modeling gig, it's understandable that you'd want to share.

Headshaker of the Week: See Duffie v. City of Lincoln, from the Eighth Circuit, which describes a "high-risk traffic stop" in which police pulled guns, hid behind their car doors, and ordered a driver to exit his vehicle.

Key passage: "The officers knew that Duffie did not match the description of the young man at the convenience store. Duffie was not a young man in a tank top with braids; at the time, he was a bald, 58-year-old double-amputee."

At least they got the guy's gender right.

And he didn't get away.

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