A man has been detained by police in China under suspicion of stealing personal data for an act of objectification uncannily similar to Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s collegiate misconduct when he was a Harvard undergraduate.

Mr Ma Zhengyi created a website listing the personal details of tens of thousands of male and female students from the cohorts enrolled in Beijing’s Renmin University from 2014 to 2020.

The information included the students’ names, ID photos, colleges and home towns, and an attractiveness score out of 100 was attached alongside each profile on the site.

The website, which had been online for at least three years, was first exposed by Weibo users, who found screenshots of it on Mr Ma’s account on the Chinese microblogging platform.

Mr Ma had allegedly boasted of his site, saying that he had wanted to make it public since the second year of his university studies.

He also wrote that he had shared it within a limited circle, for fear of being hauled up by feminists.

Police in Beijing’s Haidian district said on Monday that a 25-year-old man had been arrested for illegally obtaining students’ personal information, among other illegal activities.

Investigations are ongoing.

Mr Ma’s alma mater Renmin University on Sunday confirmed it was looking into complaints it had received and had contacted the police.

The incident became a trending topic on Weibo at the weekend, with more information about Mr Ma revealed by the platform’s users.

This included his curriculum vitae, his being a recipient of a prestigious national scholarship as a student at Renmin University, and his subsequent employment upon graduation as an engineer at Tencent’s messaging and mobile payment app WeChat.

He was also found to have shared original source code for an artificial intelligence demo on code-storing platform GitHub that could digitally “undress women with one click”, Chinese media reported.

Mr Ma’s actions have raised concerns over the safety of personal data in China.

Weibo users commented that his position at WeChat may have afforded him access to even more private information than his university did.

As at May 2023, the Chinese app had more than 1.3 billion active users, according to Tencent’s financial report.

Mr Ma’s actions have drawn comparisons with one of Facebook chief Zuckerberg’s more notorious acts before he started the social network.

As a sophomore at Harvard University, Mr Zuckerberg created FaceMash, which allowed visitors to the site to compare pictures of the university’s students side by side and pick the one they considered more physically attractive.

He reportedly hacked the college’s Internet security to access student photos for his site.

FaceMash was briefly popular before university administrators caught up with Mr Zuckerberg, who was nearly expelled for violating campus security and his fellow students’ privacy.

The incident was immortalised in the Hollywood film The Social Network, and also mentioned during a US congressional hearing in 2018, when Mr Zuckerberg described FaceMash as a “prank site”.