Canadian subscribers of the adultery website Ashley Madison filed on Thursday a $578-million class-action suit against the operators of the portal.
Two law firms, Ontario-based Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg LLP, filed the lawsuit of their clients who are subscribers of Ashley in response to exposure by a hacker group of data of 39 million members. The target of the lawsuit, filed with the Ontario Court of Justice, are Avid Dating Life Inc. and Avid Life Media Inc.
The personal data of Canadian members exposed by the hackers are their personal names, emails, home addresses and message history that were posted online publicly on Tuesday. The hackers, Impact Team, said on Friday that they hold massive data such as photos, internal documents and emails that they would release online, reports Reuters.
Associated Press reports that the plaintiff, Eliot Shore, enlisted in the website - which has for its slogan "Life is short. Have an affair." - to look for a companion after his wife died of breast cancer. With a dead wife, Shore insisted that he did not cheat and never met with other members of the portal.
The Canadian lawsuit damages sought is substantially larger than the one filed in a U.S. District Court in which only $5 million is sought. Missouri lawyers filed that one on behalf of a female member who removed her personal information from Ashley Madison through the "paid-delete" process.
The Canadian law firms said that more Canadians have approached it to inquire about how they could protect their privacy rights. Lawyer Ted Charney explains, "They are outraged that AshleyMadison.com failed to protect its users' information. In many cases, the users paid an additional fee for the website to remove all of their user data, only to discover that the information was left intact and exposed."
The email addresses show the Canadian members of the cheating website include federal, provincial and municipal workers and employees of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Philip DeWirek, who holds a 4.7 percent stake in Ashley Madison, dismissed the class-action lawsuits as a part of the American way of life. He adds, "They have seeped slowly into Canada, it's all just one general cesspool of greedy lawyers."