Mystery database lists breed ready status of 1.8M Chinese women
- 5 years ago
BEIJING — Weird things have come out of China, but probably none as disturbing as this list straight out of The Handmaid's Tale.
According to the Guardian, Dutch internet expert Victor Gevers was searching for open databases in China when he stumbled on an insecure data cache with info on over 1.8 million Chinese women.
Screenshots Gevers posted of the database to Twitter shows fields labelled in English.
It details names, addresses, phone numbers, and marital status, but also lists oddly specific and troubling information, such as location and whether or not they're 'breed ready.'
Gevers said on Twitter that the women's ages range from 15 to 94, with the average being 32. The youngest breed ready lady is 18, the oldest 39. Eighty-nine percent are single, 10 percent divorced, and 1 percent widowed. More than 80 percent of them also live in Beijing.
There's also fields in the dataset labelled "Political" and "hasvideo," followed by links to Facebook — which is still banned in China.
According to Gevers' Twitter account, the database has been unavailable as of Monday afternoon.
There's no telling what kind of organization the database was made for, but folks on Twitter are speculating that it could be a government registry, or a dating app.
According to the Guardian, Dutch internet expert Victor Gevers was searching for open databases in China when he stumbled on an insecure data cache with info on over 1.8 million Chinese women.
Screenshots Gevers posted of the database to Twitter shows fields labelled in English.
It details names, addresses, phone numbers, and marital status, but also lists oddly specific and troubling information, such as location and whether or not they're 'breed ready.'
Gevers said on Twitter that the women's ages range from 15 to 94, with the average being 32. The youngest breed ready lady is 18, the oldest 39. Eighty-nine percent are single, 10 percent divorced, and 1 percent widowed. More than 80 percent of them also live in Beijing.
There's also fields in the dataset labelled "Political" and "hasvideo," followed by links to Facebook — which is still banned in China.
According to Gevers' Twitter account, the database has been unavailable as of Monday afternoon.
There's no telling what kind of organization the database was made for, but folks on Twitter are speculating that it could be a government registry, or a dating app.