> If the researcher had downloaded the 2TB of data and published it as a torrent, then laymen might care Nope. In fact, you couldn't be more wrong. The outcome

> If the researcher had downloaded the 2TB of data and published it as a torrent, then laymen might care Nope. In fact, you couldn't be more wrong. The outcome Joe Six-Pack would get from it is not that "data aggregators are dangerous" but that "security researchers, privacy advocates and cyber-criminals are pretty much the same, they are doing the same thing - stealing your data from a honest hard-working marketers - and then hide behind 'privacy' and 'research' when they get caught". And most of the press will run with it gladly, it's an entertaining story. You can't do your cause - whatever it is - worse disservice than to commit crime "to show them". That makes you a criminal - whose argument will be ignored because nobody wants to agree with a criminal - and your cause the one which is promoted by criminals. It's very hard to argue from this position. Sometimes there's no choice - i.e. if the whole enterprise is criminalized in advance, as is criticism of the power in totalitarian states. But nobody smart should put oneself in this position voluntarily. > going full Snowden would have had much greater impact Snowden revealed secrets of the NSA that did not hurt average citizen - on the contrary, in many cases were deployed against the average citizen. In this case, you would be the one directly hurting the average citizen. You wouldn't get the Snowden cape.