| Title | Chinese Database of 1.8 Million "BreedReady" Women: Lost in Translation? | |
| Date | Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:19PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the birth-of-a-new-meme dept. | ||
An unprotected MongoDB database of 1.8 million women in China has been taken offline after drawing media attention for the inclusion of a data field designating whether the women are "BreedReady." The database was spotted by Victor Gevers, a researcher based in the Netherlands who founded the GDI Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on improving online security.
Interpretations of the database field in Western media swiftly skewed towards the sinister, with The Daily Beast invoking Margaret Atwood's dystopian book The Handmaid's Tale and The Guardian framing the term in the context of Chinese government concern over falling birthrates and the gender imbalance arising from government policies and cultural biases.
In a Twitter conversation with The Register, Gevers said the exposed data has been taken offline thanks to the social media attention his post received. Presently, he doesn't know who owns the data and without that, there's no way to be certain what the "BreedReady" boolean field really means. "We have talked to many people about this one and the majority thinks [it] literally means what it says," he said. "But others say this could be a language barrier thing."
Otto Kolbl, a researcher and doctoral student at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who studies socio-economic development in China, warned against jumping to any conclusions. He suggested "BreedReady" might just be a Chinese developer's bad English for "willing to have a baby," which would not be out of place in a dating app.
BreedReady™ is a good new meme, just waiting to reproduce and be truly born. 👶
Also at The Next Web.
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printed from SoylentNews, Chinese Database of 1.8 Million "BreedReady" Women: Lost in Translation? on 2024-04-19 16:27:46