About 175 university student, staff and faculty email accounts appeared to be registered to Ashley Madison, a website that facilitates extramarital affairs, following an Aug. 18 data leak.
The university email accounts registered with the site included addresses that belong to current and former University Relations, University Police, Division of Information Technology and provost office employees, among others.
Ashley Madison does not verify user email addresses when accounts are created. The Diamondback will not name the leaked university email addresses because those listed are not elected officials or public figures.
The Impact Team, the group of hackers that claimed responsibility for the leak, said it published the data after Ashley Madison owner Avid Life Media refused to take down the site in response to demands made by the hacking outfit.
The leak allegedly included the names, credit card information, email addresses and physical addresses of more than 30 million Ashley Madison users.
“We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of [Avid Life Media] and their members,” an Impact Team statement read. “Now everyone gets to see their data. … Learn your lesson and make amends. Embarrassing now, but you’ll get over it.”
Using a umd.edu address to register for a website unrelated to the university does not violate university policy, Amy Ginther, a DIT Project NEThics coordinator, wrote in an email.
DIT’s Technology Appropriate Use Policy Web page states: “Personal use of these resources is not explicitly prohibited (and is expected for our university residents), however that use must be in moderation and not conflict with departmental expectations for work performance.”
Sam Kerstein, a philosophy professor, said although there is not an obvious ethical issue with a university employee signing up for Ashley Madison with a work-related email account, employees should refrain from using the site while in the office.
“It might be that it’s wrong, morally speaking, to cheat on your spouse,” he said. “But it’s nevertheless not a violation of university ethics to use your university email on your own time to sign up for something like Ashley Madison.”
Inside Higher Ed reported that there are nearly 75,000 unique .edu accounts in the Ashley Madison database and compiled a top-10 list of the universities with the most email addresses registered with the site. The list included five Big Ten schools — Michigan State, Penn State, Ohio State, University of Minnesota and University of Michigan — with a range of 450 to 696 registered accounts.
Registering for the site using a umd.edu account isn’t necessarily worse than signing up with a personal email, philosophy professor Susan Dwyer said, though one could argue that university employees should be held to a higher moral standard than others.
“You can begin to make the argument that no state employee should be using their email address for any purpose that is not directly related to their work,” she said. “It’s very difficult to make a moral judgment about an individual just on the basis on the fact that an email address associated with a person shows up in the data dump. … Is it made any worse by the fact that someone signed up with a university email address? And even then, the answer isn’t clear.”
