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$4.5k is surely a small amount of money if they had employed someone to do this kind of work.

However, since you the work was done for free the author had sunk the time and risked getting $0 for it. Even if the author is inclined to go black hat, there's a lot more (likely illegal) work to be done for author to extract value from it.

As such, $4.5k is a good deal for the author - Facebook offered it knowing that and author accepted it knowing that.

I don't think this remotely reflects Facebook's true value of privacy (although this admittedly may not be high).

Facebook's only potential loss by making this offer is that it may make it slightly less likely for talented people to work externally on white hat exploits.




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