To be clear, I think discussions of ethics and morality in company purposes are (or at least, ought to be) very much on topic for the site as a whole. I just think that discussing the morality of this particular business on this particular comment thread is likely to risk being off-topic, because it's too easy to read it as "Yeah, but they deserved it," and maybe the company did but the story is primarily about the users, not the company itself.
Here's a proposition that I think is on-topic that we can discuss: It is, IMO, clearly irresponsible and reprehensible to go around encouraging people to break their marriage vows and then not take world-class care of the database listing the people you so encouraged. If you can't find qualified people to take world-class security measures, maybe you shouldn't be running the site at all.
Possibly the worst bit is the "you need to pay us money to be removed from our database" aspect of the business model, which gives the whole thing a decidedly protection-racket-ish air. And then, apparently, they didn't remove you from the database even if you paid the protection money!
"It is, IMO, clearly irresponsible and reprehensible to go around encouraging people to break their marriage vows and then not take world-class care of the database"
It's reprehensible for any third party to go around encouraging people to break any sort of vows between any two people, and it's irresponsible for any online site with a large userbase to not take world-class care of their database. Why should the two propositions be connected?
To me, it's not more irresponsible because of the nature of the site, and it's not suddenly more reprehensible because they got hacked. In addition, I would say that leaking the database is more reprehensible than the site itself ever was.
The two propositions should be connected because how bad it is when your name shows up in some hacked company's database depends on what the hacked company is, and being outed as someone who tried to have an extramarital affair is more damaging than being outed as someone who (say) bought some shoes.
(Some people will feel that this is balanced out by the fact that these are Bad People, who deserve to have their badness exposed. If so, failing to protect the database might have been less irresponsible and reprehensible in AM's case. But it would be quite a coincidence for these things to balance perfectly. One way or the other, the service you're providing to your customers makes some difference to just how awful it is when you fail to keep their data private.)
Here's a proposition that I think is on-topic that we can discuss: It is, IMO, clearly irresponsible and reprehensible to go around encouraging people to break their marriage vows and then not take world-class care of the database listing the people you so encouraged. If you can't find qualified people to take world-class security measures, maybe you shouldn't be running the site at all.