We spoke to Ashley Madison's CEO about its tech and privacy just before the hack scandal broke - here's what he said

The leak of customer data from extramarital affairs dating website Ashley Madison could sign the death warrant for the business - mainly because it prides itself on the heightened level of privacy it offers to its customers.

And when I spoke to the company's boss in May, he made it a point to mention how Ashley Madison was at the forefront of cutting edge technology.

Ashley Madison, owned by parent company Avid Life Media which has a host of other niche dating websites, used the fact that it provides a unique service that even allowed customers to pay for all their data to be erased.

In other words, if you cancel your account, your details will not be stored on any server or cached anywhere.

The luxury would cost users £15 ($20) to remove all their information. According to Buzzfeed, the service raked in nearly $2 million for the website.

However, according to data seen by The Guardian, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Since hackers released nearly 10 gigabytes of user information from a July breach on Tuesday, information has surfaced that Ashley Madison "retained enough personal data about users to identify them to spouses - as the site's hackers have claimed - despite offering a paid-for 'full delete' service."

"We use technology to deliver discretion"

Ashley Madison has spent the last few months trying to get a bank to launch an IPO in London, which was estimated to raise £135 million ($200 million) to fuel a massive expansion. In May I spoke to Avid Life Media's boss Noel Biderman about the impending flotation.

At the time, he told me that the company created the features popularised in popular mobile dating and social media photo apps "years ago" when it was looking to offer "how to have the perfect affair."

Noel Biderman told Business Insider in a phone interview that while the enormous success of dating apps Tinder and Grindr and photo messaging app Snapchat was "great for the industry," Ashley Madison is often overlooked for its technological innovations.

"We have always said that we are here to give you the 'perfect affair' by using technology to deliver discretion. What Snapchat gives is actually a minor feature of what we have used on our platform for ages and the location-based settings for Tinder or Grindr are, again, just small features of a wider platform we have. We've been doing this since 2002," said Biderman at the time.

"I say good for them for making this central to their apps, it's great for brand positioning and the industry as a whole but we were far ahead of everyone else on this before with the website and then with the phone application."

He added that the fact users could choose to wipe out their history at the website was a major feature.

Grindr, launched in 2009, is a dating app which is focused on the gay community which uses location-based GPS to find someone local to hook up with. It has around 10 million users.

Snapchat, launched in 2011, puts a time limit on how long recipients can view and download photos, videos, or messages. This means that if the content was not downloaded during the time frame, they should technically be destroyed. It has nearly 200 million users.

Tinder, launched in 2012, is another location based dating app that has a gimmick to swipe right if you want to get to know the person in a picture or swipe left if you're not interested. It has around 50 million users.

Ashley Madison launched its website in 2001 and now has 36 million members in 46 countries. In 2014, it had $115 million (£76 million) in sales, which is an almost fourfold increase since 2009. Biderman said that revenue is projected to reach over $150 million (£99 million) over the next year or so at the time of the phone interview.

Biderman said that the website had used similar location-based technology as Grindr, Tinder, and Snapchat, but on one big platform. He added that its developments though goes above and beyond those other app offerings and even wipes location-based history.

The London IPO

The scandal is sure to be a blow to Ashley Madison's prospects. It was already struggling it seems to get an IPO off the ground.

Now, it has to deal with the fallout of the scandal - not just the hacking but also the fact its technology is under tremendous scrutiny.

In July, I spoke to Biderman again to catch up on how the IPO was going. Instead of telling me he found a bookrunner for the float, he admitted that the company was thinking of abandoning the IPO altogether.

He said the company had potentially found a "better option."

"There is no change in securing a bank to lead an IPO but right now we are looking and assessing two different strategies. We can do a straight-up IPO, but since the news of the potential launch was made, we got a lot of attention and this has garnered a range of further options," said Biderman at the time.

"With the kind of income we generated over the last eight years and if we remain as profitable as we are now over the next eight years, it may be in our current shareholders' interest to for us to use an investment vehicle to give them set dividends. For example, investing $1 a year, would give you $1 in return the following year, rather than investing $1 and potentially getting $5 some time down the road."

Business Insider got in touch with Biderman's representatives in London and the US but they were not immediately available for an update.