Who’s cheating?

Have you ever wondered if your significant other was cheating? In today’s day and age, it has become easier than ever to discreetly be unfaithful, especially with the use of the Internet. Ashley Madison, an online infidelity matchmaking service, is one of those resources. However, in July of 2015, the site was anonymously hacked.

According to

“We were lab mates and read about the data breach in the news,” Chohaney wrote. “Our minds immediately went to the same place—these records have billing addresses, which can be mapped. Our first goal was to map where users live. The next question was, do users cluster? And, if so, why?”

Chohaney’s and Panozzo’s worked as a team to delve into the scandalous data exposed by anonymous hackers from the extramarital website Ashley Madison. They said that they were intrigued by what they could learn from the exposed data.

“Kim and I had many theories about how Ashley Madison users were geographically distributed and how user ship spreads from one area to another,” Chohaney wrote. “We were also motivated as geographers to create more accurate user ship maps than the media, which were flawed from including non-payer accounts.”

The researchers reduced the millions of leaked Ashley Madison accounts to 702,309 subscriber profiles with usable billing addresses. They also eliminated inactive or duplicate accounts and focused on men who paid for the website’s services.

According to the researchers’ findings, the Fairfield area in Connecticut led the nation in Ashley Madison subscriptions followed by the metropolitan areas of Boulder, Colorado; Jacksonville, North Carolina and Manchester, New Hampshire.

The researchers’ map indicates the Cleveland area and Ohio’s southwest corner have higher subscription rates than our local region; and that the lowest subscription rates were in poor Appalachian and southern locations, reinforcing the researchers’ conclusion that wealth is linked to Ashley Madison user ship.

Chohaney explains they were surprised that factors affecting infidelity such as income, male breadwinning and population found at an individual level also held true for entire metropolitan areas. They found that on average, wealthier, younger, employed, typically non-religious men were more likely to spend their money on the extramarital services.

“This is the only academic geography article we know of that collects, processes and analyzes publicly available data originally stolen and released by Internet hackers,” Chohaney said in a previous interview with UT News. “Due to ethics concerns, we handled the Ashley Madison user account information with the utmost respect for personal security and privacy. No individual user identities or locations can be derived from our work.”