State IDs of China’s rich and powerful, including Jack Ma, leaked in apparent privacy protest

Imagine if the social security numbers and home addresses of people like Tim Cook, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet got published publicly on Twitter. That’s basically what just happened to some of China’s rich and powerful.

Early today, a Twitter account called “state ID” in Chinese, which has since been suspended, began tweeting what it claims are the state ID numbers associated with wealthy, famous people in China. Some posts also included addresses, additional ID information, and even state ID card photos. Alibaba founder Jack Ma, China’s richest man Wang Jianlin and his wife Lin Ning and son Wang Sicong (a prominent games industry investor), businessman Guo Wengui and his family, Great Firewall architect Fang Binxing, famed nationalist commentator Sima Nan, Beijing’s biggest real estate developer Pan Shiyi, and Global Times editor Hu Xijin are among those whose information has apparently been leaked.

Fang Binxing, the architect of China’s internet censorship system, probably wishes he could censor this.

There’s no way to confirm the accuracy of the numbers, and we won’t link to or share them on this site. The user who tweeted them gave only a single clue as to his motivations. In response to a tweet by Foreign Policy editor Isaac Stone Fish, he or she wrote:

Are you surprised by this information? I hope this will make my countrymen think about how worthless their personal privacy is, so that even the whereabouts of the rich and famous can be easily monitored.

In China, your state ID number is your identity. It’s used for everything and – like a social security number in the US – it’s not the kind of thing you want to give away, as having it fall into the wrong hands would make identity theft quite easy. ID details could be used for everything from setting up online accounts to booking hotels to confirming identities for bank transfers.

If the numbers are real, the leaks could cause quite a few problems for those whose information has been revealed. The Twitter account is suspended, but a web-cached version of the page still exists, and any number of users may also have taken screenshots before the account went offline.