El Reg, Fair And Balanced!
Hmm. If we're taking time over linguistic inexactitude, then I'd point out that "shooting fish in a a barrel" means "easy", not "commonplace.
And, is El Reg growing up? Placing nuance above cheapshots? Whodathunkit.
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 …
I don't know about this case, but on one project I was working on, for a meat processing plant, they use an AutoFOM on the pigs to measure the quality and thickness of various parts of the meat.
In German, one cut of pork is called "Schweinelachs" or simply "Lachs", which is from the back, I think it is the Loin in English. But "Lachs" literally means Salmon. Therefore, in the database you had all of the correct labels for lean meat, lean without bone etc. and the Salmon.
When having to use English terms and you are not a native speaker or have only a very rudimentary understanding of English, it is very easy to make such mistakes. Obviously it works the other way as well, my German wife has a lot of fun poking holes in my German.
I worked with a German library for reading and writing data from/to the automotive diagnostic port. One of the areas it could report was "Actual Values". (Things like road speed, rpm, fuel consumption, etc) We kept asking why "Actual"? It took ages until somebody who was reasonably fluent in German had an Ah-ha! moment, and realized it was a mistranslation of "Aktuell Wert" - which would be better translated as "Current Values".
I figured the 'prepared to have children' option, but let's look at alternatives, keeping to the 'poor english' explanation.
Bred Already. Is a mother.
Keeps animals. Likely to buy more in future so consider when calculating rates to breed pets in the area.
Ideal host for bioweapon incubation, certified by Alex Mercer.
Firstly, you would have to wonder how the database compiler came by the information. Did they ask the people?
If not (eg, it's not from a dating site or similar), then it's most likely to be a computed field, I think. There are other fields in there that could be the basis for computing this (eg applying an age range), so perhaps that's what has been done.
(I'm not saying that there is a genuine formula for this, but that someone could have made one up anyway.)
While we're two countries separated by a common language, the USians have used the term "pre-pregnant" to refer to any fertile woman.
In that case it was some of the usual controlling bullshit, essentially that if you could potentially have a baby, you should abide by all the expectations of a pregnant mother. So no drinking, no $FOOD depending on cultural norms*, no drugs etc.
I'm sure urban planners do this all the time. The Dutch are quite effective at it, so while no-one asked if my wife and I were planning to have a kid, being a married couple in a child friendly neighbourhood, I'm pretty sure we we're down as "potential kid" in some planners DB.
Planning for where new schools and child clinics should be sited being based of where future babies are most likely isn't nearly as creepy as the other possible implications of this DB.
* compare the advice for pregnant mums in France versus Germany