Ashley Madison data dump: Which states (and cities) are the most unfaithful?

A post on Reddit titled "The Most Unfaithful States in the Union", showing states by the amount of money spent on Ashley Madison services as revealed in the spouse-cheating site's data dump, is getting a lot of attention.

It shows Alabama shockingly high, with other Southern states strewn throughout the list.

South Carolina is a respectable 36th, for example.

Much conjecture in the comments on the post suggests that Alabama is high because it is the first state alphabetically, and if your creating a profile on a site meant to abet adultery, you might not want to put in your real address. Others point out, however, that the figures are based on dollars spent, which means credit cards, which means users would have had to use their real addresses for verification.

Perhaps a more useful set of charts exploring the data dump come from The Independent newspaper in Britain, which tallied six measures to find that:

• users are mostly men (86% to 14%)
• users mostly are seeking affairs (18.3 million attached men seeking females vs. 12.7 million single men seeking females)
• users mostly are in Canada and the US (6.3% of Canada's population , 5.1% of the United State's population and 4.6% of Australia's population had accounts on the site)
• Sao Paulo, New York, Sydney, Toronto and Santiago are the top 5 cities of registered users
• many users are powerful, or in powerful industries (thousands of government, big business and big tech email addresses were in the data dump), and
• many users, not surprisingly, used invalid email addresses (34 percent of email address were invalid because they were deleted, fake to begin with or reflect autobot sign ups.

This story was originally published August 21, 2015 at 10:34 AM with the headline "Ashley Madison data dump: Which states (and cities) are the most unfaithful?."