A Tencent programmer has been arrested in Beijing for operating a platform rating students’ appearances for several years, using a database stolen from Renmin University in Beijing.

Ma Zhengyi, 25, allegedly hacked into his alma mater’s student database and created an online platform to rate students’ appearances based on their official school photo. His social media posts from 2020 suggest the platform has existed for around three years. 

The platform included profiles of RUC students, both male and female, from 2014 to 2020. Personal information displayed included their official school photo, name, student number, birthplace, and birthday. 

RUC, based in Beijing, is one of China’s most prestigious universities, known for its strengths in humanities and economics. The platform, called “RUC IR FACE,” first came to light on RUC’s internal student discussion board on Saturday. 

The university announced the next day it was investigating the incident and cooperating with police.  

Announcing Ma’s arrest on Monday, police in Beijing’s Haidian District said that they pay “much attention to the protection of citizens’ personal information, and will crack down on related crimes in accordance with the law.”

Ma’s now-deleted profile on Github, a software development hosting service, shows that he also developed an AI-powered software generating nude images of women. According to his now-deleted personal website, he joined Tencent as a programmer after graduating from RUC with a Master’s degree in computer science in 2022. He also previously interned at ByteDance and Huawei. 

A staff member at RUC told domestic media Monday that Ma has been suspended from his job. Tencent did not respond to Sixth Tone’s request for comment by publication time. 

The incident has sparked outrage online, with a related hashtag viewed more than 500 million times on the microblogging platform Weibo, despite other related hashtags being taken down from the site earlier. 

Netizens have questioned how Ma was able to hack an established institution like RUC. Fu Jian, director at Henan Zejin Law Firm, told domestic media that the university is ultimately responsible for the information leakage. He suggested universities strengthen the protection of students’ personal information and address system vulnerabilities on time.

Similar cases have happened before in China. In 2021, a famous artist was criticized for staging a special exhibition called “Uglier and Uglier,” which scored the appearances of university students he secretly took pictures of. 

Netizens have also compared Ma to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who infamously launched an appearance rating platform for his fellow students called FaceMash during his sophomore year at Harvard University. 

On the movie rating platform Douban, several users have left comments for the 2010 Oscar-winning movie “The Social Network,” which depicted the launch of FaceMash and Facebook, expressing their discontent with Ma’s actions.

“I rewatched the film because of the case. Now I want to puke,” a user commented Monday. 

Editor: Vincent Chow. 

(Header image: VCG)