Data analyst Jishai Evers, the CEO of the data-driven journalism website Dadaviz, says it's not only that "users are lying" but also that "Ashley Madison created fake accounts or didn't do much to stop others creating fake accounts" that makes the data problematic.

For example the most common birth date users entered was, by far, Jan. 1, which is also the easiest to enter. On the other hand, the city data should be accurate.

Ashley Madison did not verify email addresses.

Avid Life Media, which owns the website, has not actually confirmed it's their data set but many analysts have said they believe it is. And the source data may be incomplete.

CBC News has not verified the data from other sources.

We could go on, but you probably get the idea. So take these numbers with a grain of salt, please.

The data dump

These numbers show what was in Ashley Madison files released by Impact Team:

- 37 million user accounts containing name, street address, phone numbers, birth date, relationship status, what they want, if they drink or smoke, and so on. A little less than half are in the U.S.

- 9.6 million credit card transactions from 2008-2015, which include name, address, email address and amount paid. Women did not need to pay Ashley Madison for most services.

The women of Ashley Madison

"Almost none of the women in the Ashley Madison database ever used the site," according to Gizmodo editor-in-chief Annalee Newitz. Gizmodo is a technology blog owned by Gawker Media. Here's what she found:

- 5.55 million accounts are marked female (about 15 per cent of all profiles). Other sources have slightly different numbers. Dadaviz shows five million female accounts, 14 per cent of the total.

- 12,000 profiles seem to be about women who are active on the site. Most of female profiles appear to have been abandoned very soon after they were created.

- Over 9,000 accounts with female profiles had ashleymadison.com email address, while just 1,000 had male profiles or no gender specified.

- 68,709 female profiles had an IP address that suggests they were created on one of Ashley Madison's own computers, compared to 12,069 male or no-gender-specified accounts.

- 1,492 women had checked the messages in their Ashley Madison accounts. Two-thirds of the men had done so (20.3 million).

- 2,409 women had engaged in chat on Ashley Madison, compared to 11 million men, or about one-third of the men.

- 9,700 women replied to a message from an Ashley Madison member, while nearly six million men had done so.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ashley-madisons-members-numbers-090000972.html