A lawsuit was filed yesterday in Saline Circuit court by a Benton man using a John Doe alias seeking to represent all those damaged by release of personal information in the hacking of records of Ashley Madison, the website that advertises itself as a way for people to have affairs with married people.

The lawsuit against the Canadian company that operates the site says the company failed to protect its information and failed to give users timely notice of the hack and they’d been damaged as a result. The suit notes that the defendant and others paid for a “paid delete” service that was supposed to scrub records of personal information, but files of users have been widely made available on the web.

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The suit said the failure of security measures resulted in the availability of even more personal information from those who thought they’d paid to guarantee deletion. The suit claims the potential for further damage, including identity theft.

The suit was filed by Little Rock lawyers Stephanie Linam, Charles “Skip” Davidson, David Gerstner and Christopher Jennings.

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This isn’t the first class action lawsuit in the matter.

The suit focuses on promises of confidentiality, potential financial harm and requirements of federal communications law and not on personal embarrassment or damage to family relationships by release of the information. At some point perhaps we’ll get to the bottom of whether this site actually facilitated illicit relationships, or whether the overwhelmingly male clientele had been duped into paying to exchange notes with fictitious women, a scenario for which some evidence exists.

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