Hacker Finds a Way to Delete Facebook Photos: Earns $12,500 From Facebook for Showing How to Fix It

Now this is the new economy.

A 21 year old Indian named Arul Kumar, described variously as a hacker or 'security researcher,' discovered a way to delete any photo stored in Facebook.

Now this is quite a valuable piece of knowledge. As anyone knows who has ever regretted posting or having seen posted a photo they would, in the harsh light of dawn, prefer to keep out the public view. Facebook, however, jealously guards its right to determine what gets deleted or not. And as many a rueful job or college applicant has learned, those doing the hiring or admitting are adept at uncovering the unsavory or humiliating.

So our buddy Arul was delivering quite the public service, though whether that was his intent is hard to say. However, this power to broker sources of information contributes to Facebook's commercial value. So Facebook paid Arul $12,500 to explain how the bug worked - and then promptly 'fixed' it, much to the chagrin of the posting public.

$12,500 doesn't sound like much in the US or Europe (nor for many in contemporary India, for that matter) but the initial investment may be beside the point. Arul has earned global attention for his hacking chops, differentiated himself from the legion of anonymous keyboard grinds and may well be entertaining a host of tasty job offers in the US, India or other points north, south, east and west.

The beauty of the transaction is that it shows the financial potential of the intangible economy: a company that showcases people's photos for free and makes money doing so, is hacked - for free - by a young computer geek, whom it then pays for the knowledge he created from his ephemeral efforts. Talk about making something out of nothing. JL

Kit Eaton reports in Fast Company via TechInvestorNews:

Security researcher Arul Kumar has earned $12,500 after reporting a dramatic Facebook bug that allowed anyone with the right know–how to delete any image stored within the social network, no matter who owned the image in the first place
The bug worked through Facebook's Support Dashboard, the system that let interested parties send official requests to take down photos. During the original setup of this system, two critical numbers, the Photo_id number and the user's profile ID number, could be exploited by a hacker to intercept the take–down procedure without the photo owner's knowledge. The same exploit could be used to pull photos from pages and groups as well as directly from a user's profile.

While the bug seems innocuous, particularly for individual users, there's still a malicious element that could have damaged the archives of users who exploit Facebook as a kind of photo storage mechanism (and thus a bigger potential to damage Facebook's reputation with users) and also to hurt the efforts of brands that use Facebook for outreach