In any event, the ethics of the data publication itself is orthogonal to the behavior of people on Twitter...unless we want to blame Twitter for facilitating problematic behaviors by its users.
To me the publication of the data is not quite so black and white because ultimately the Ashley-Madison data was going to escape into the rest of the internet. This assumes it hadn't already been published prior to the recent event and that's an assumption because Ashley-Madison is and has been in position to monetize the data in standard ways [and perhaps rather non-standard ways] from day one.
Which is a roundabout way of pointing out that Ashley-Madison is and always has been in a position to publish this data via changing its terms of service or by selling itself to a successor company and transfer the data as just another asset. The key here is that individual users don't hold license to the data, and so a successor company can do with it as they please restricted only by actual law-enforcement Uber/AirBnB style [as opposed to hiring lawyers and restricting their actions based on what's on the books].
Web-scale infidelity [even if much of it is of the weaker Jimmy Carter sort: "I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."] will inevitably be followed by web-scale exposure. Sharing a secret means giving up access-control to the information...someone else can read my diary or talk to my best friend or read it off a web-server, and the likelihood of someone doing so correlates directly to their interest in doing so.
Which brings me back to the ethics. There's no clear deontological case for a universal law against publishing data, and the long-term Utilitarian optimum solution is intractable. So we're left with the normal social context of those aspiring to extra-marital affairs are worse than gossips or vice-versa.
To me the publication of the data is not quite so black and white because ultimately the Ashley-Madison data was going to escape into the rest of the internet. This assumes it hadn't already been published prior to the recent event and that's an assumption because Ashley-Madison is and has been in position to monetize the data in standard ways [and perhaps rather non-standard ways] from day one.
Which is a roundabout way of pointing out that Ashley-Madison is and always has been in a position to publish this data via changing its terms of service or by selling itself to a successor company and transfer the data as just another asset. The key here is that individual users don't hold license to the data, and so a successor company can do with it as they please restricted only by actual law-enforcement Uber/AirBnB style [as opposed to hiring lawyers and restricting their actions based on what's on the books].
Web-scale infidelity [even if much of it is of the weaker Jimmy Carter sort: "I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."] will inevitably be followed by web-scale exposure. Sharing a secret means giving up access-control to the information...someone else can read my diary or talk to my best friend or read it off a web-server, and the likelihood of someone doing so correlates directly to their interest in doing so.
Which brings me back to the ethics. There's no clear deontological case for a universal law against publishing data, and the long-term Utilitarian optimum solution is intractable. So we're left with the normal social context of those aspiring to extra-marital affairs are worse than gossips or vice-versa.