According to the creator’s Patreon:<p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/profileengine" rel="nofollow">https://www.patreon.com/profileengine</a><p>> <i>I spent ten years on a project to build a free, public, highly advanced search engine for social network data. I obtained special permission from Facebook to index 420 million public profiles. When Facebook reneged on the deal and tried to destroy my business, I spent years of my life and a lot of money on legal costs and eventually obtained a settlement. I have continued to operate Profile engine for several years despite it not making money because it stands between Facebook and a monopoly over social data and because it helps educate people not to trust Facebook.</i><p>It seems like his main motive is to ruin Facebook — ostensibly by making it obvious to the world the dangers of FB data. And he’s doing this by releasing the accessible data — including photos — of every user who set their profile public.<p>The PR harm to Facebook is obvious. I’m not so sure the millions of people naive enough to not tighten their privacy settings will be completely understanding. Even if there is no legal danger, this doesn’t seem well thought out in terms of consequences.<p>Edit: A Quartz article from 2014, in which the service is described as “spammy”.<p><a href="https://qz.com/279940/meet-profile-engine-the-spammy-facebook-crawler-hated-by-people-who-want-to-be-forgotten/" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/279940/meet-profile-engine-the-spammy-faceboo...</a>