This reminds me of a random, but chilling, scene in "Minority Report". The protagonist confronts a man he thinks is responsible for killing his child.
The man decides to reassure the protagonist by explaining how kind he was to the child, and made sure the child didn't suffer when he killed him. He's presenting it as though this is a legitimate defense for such an obvious violation. The part that sticks with me is the man's seeming sincerity in believing he's making a case for himself, "yeah I did this horrible thing, but I did it in the nicest way possible so it's really kinda big of me if you think about it"
This post fills me with the same chills. The author's utter lack of culpability for such a viscerally gross violation and strange attempts to spin it as though he's kind of a good person for doing it in a slightly less terrible way than he could have otherwise done it...
To be clear, he didn't go out and do a security research project with ethical standards in place. He made it clear how laughable he considers the concept of 'consent' (an ethical way to do this might've been to take people's pictures, then ask them if they were OK with sharing it right after. He doesn't consider such a process at all)
Instead, he thought of an amoral and illegal way for him to use people without their consent, for his own pleasure, curiosity, and amusement and decided to call it 'art'. There are more horrible ways he could have done the above, sure. But that argument to me sounds as hollow as the "but he didn't suffer" argument from the movie.
Him expressing his own sense of magnanimousness and ironic sense of victimhood at the end of it... it really is a scary glimpse into the mind of such people.
It's sad because it's very easy to misconstrue this as a "security researcher gets feds sent on him by apple" story, and I think lots of people are basically trying to frame it that way, but it's not that at all. To me, it's clearly "jackass doesn't understand consent, apple calls the feds, still a jackass, still doesn't understand".
[Note: yes I know the character in the movie is revealed as a bluff shortly after, the scene sticks with me because of the character's apparent sincerity at the moment]
[Additional Note: yes I know many of these companies also don't respect consent. Them not respecting it is not an excuse for everyone to behave the same way.]