[kebman]

A lot of hacking is done simply because public and private databases and systems just aren't good enough to serve those that they were made to serve. This made me a "hacker," in that I created programs, crawlers and spiders to find and put together the information I needed for my everyday work as a teacher (all legal, of course, though highly unconventional).

I once told my boss about one such idea I had, that I thought would be beneficial to the rest of my collegues. He told me, "Go to the principal, and word your idea so it sounds like it's his idea, and I'm sure he'll give you the go-ahead for it." I told him straight up, that, "Nah, then I'll rather keep it to myself."

[ghostpepper]

In this article the word "hacker" is actually used in the original meaning - nothing to do with breaking into systems.

[kebman]

I didn't break into any system. I merely streamlined the gathering of restricted data that I was entitled to anyway through my work. Then I made graphical representations of those data for my own use, in order to do a better job. I figured, if this works for me, it would work for my collegues as well, but I wouldn't want to divulge how I did that for free, and certainly not by letting someone else take all the credit for it. And thus I became a "hacker"...

[ghostpepper]

sorry, I re-read your original comment and now I'm not sure how I assumed it was about criminal hacking

[mettamage]

I think this idea is what the OSINT community does. Step 1: scrape websites, step 2: put it in a database.

Well, I guess you actually found databases instead of scraping sites. The OSINT community does that too.

[kerng]

Article discusses Hacker in the broader context, not limited to security.