When mothers around the world are distraught at the idea of their little kids spending more time on their smartphones than outdoors, here’s a kid that’s taken his smartphone and internet savvy to the next level.
10 year old Jani, a Finnish resident, found a bug in popular photo sharing app Instagram where anyone could delete comments. Jani is a coding enthusiast and thanks to an early start is quite the whizkid.
Jani spotted the error when he tried deleting a comment of his, but ended up deleting another’s also. “I would have been able to eliminate anyone’s, even Justin Bieber’s comments from there”, Jani told the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti. On an aside, his innocuous comment may offer an insight into why a 10 year old was on Instagram in the first place. The likes of Justin Bieber are popular in the tweens age group and it’s not surprising that Jani would reference the boy pop star.
Jani immediately emailed Instagram to inform them about the bug and not in vain. After a few days, Instagram accepted the bug and as a bug bounty offered to reward the boy $10,000.
This makes Jani the youngest person to be paid through Facebookâs bug bounty program, to date, beating the record of a 13 year old.
Instagram was bought by Facebook a couple of years ago and is today the 2nd largest used social networking site after Facebook itself. It’s not the first time that Facebook has rewarded people who have detected bugs in Facebook or any of its properties. Recently, an Indian developer and Flipkart employee was in the news for getting a $15000 bug bounty from the social network giant. Reports state that Facebook has paid over $4 million to researchers and bug bounty hunters.