I think it’s a great reaction to news stories to imagine how you could have made the same bad decisions. Furthermore this public confession of being able to imagine making bad decisions might encourage a similarly minded to 20-something to wonder why an older version of themself is so afraid of even having such a dataset. It might even prompt someone to destroy some long forgotten cache of data they exfiltrated a long time ago.

I don’t think there’s a risk that it will influence a rare person in power to enforce the rules to go lighter. I just think it encourages people to be less reckless with hoarding data who might otherwise put themselves in danger.