That's some awfully pessimistic and dehumanizing language. I just consider it to be paying someone for the trouble rather than jumping straight to "exploiting greed."
Since the person profiting is someone who obtained the secret through shady means - either breaking into an insecure system, or taking advantage of their access to a system which doesn't encrypt passwords - I don't consider it pessimistic or dehumanizing to describe the behavior as greed.
Greed is a subjective term. The company who is charging money could be described as greedy for making a profit when they could have lowered the price to remove any excess profit. Why is the person who understands and uses the system in a way it wasn't intented greedy?
Because they're stealing secrets from people? I confess I'm confused why this is confusing. The exercise here is to know when something is public that you want to keep secret. The proposed solution is to make the secret something have value independent of its secretness, to tempt those that stole the secret to obtain that independent value. I'm fine attaching "greed" to profiting from stealing secrets.
You say that like there's something wrong with exploiting greed.
Strange. I feel only a slight negative connotation of "greed". Nothing to be ashamed of or to condemn. Maybe some meaning is lost in translation to my language.
Exactly, it's as if my pay cheque is "exploiting human greed".