Oh, man, another missed opportunity to make the average Joe Six-Pack become aware of data aggregation and privacy violations. If the researcher had downloaded the 2TB of data and published it as a torrent, then laymen might care. When someone can query the list and see his own personal information being broadcast, they will understand. When they realize that anyone can look up the address, phone, and all sorts of oth…
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.