Although it’s probably better to refrain from searching the recently hacked database of the extramarital affairs dating site Ashley Madison for your colleagues, the data dump of 30 million users in aggregate is hard to resist. After all, it’s a snapshot of the extramarital habits (actual, or desired) of people around the world.
Tecnilógica, a Madrid-based digital agency, dived right in: It created a world map that shows the distribution of Ashley Madison users around the world, stripped of sensitive data, and analyzed their composition in terms of regional distribution and gender balance. The team called the project Malfideleco, which means “infidelity” in Esperanto.
The data that was plugged into the map, created through the open platform tool CartoDB, and only contained “the user gender, the sign-up date, and the city where they are located.”
The distribution (pictured above) is somewhat unsurprising: the highest concentrations of users are in the internet-saturated regions of Western Europe and North America (although America’s Midwest was pretty moderate in its Ashley Madison activity). Russia, China, and most of Africa (with the exception of South Africa) are largely Ashley Madison-free.
What is more interesting, however, is looking at the gender distribution. As one might suspect, the vast majority of Ashley Madison users worldwide—around 85%—are men. The red dots in the map correspond to areas where over 85% of users are male, the yellow where less than 85% are.
While essentially all of European, East Asia, and the Americas have over 85% male users, there’s one exception: In India (rather surprisingly), men aren’t quite so dominant—although in both the biggest cities, Delhi and Mumbai, men make up around 87% of Ashley Madison users.