I need to know what I need to protect my family and in-laws against this time.
Edit:
- yes, I also immediately downloaded the "manifesto" of the mad bomber in Norway ten years ago, not because I admired him but because I despised him.
- Troy Hunt keeps downloading data sets with peoples personal details (logins even) and is not getting into any kind of newsworthy trouble.
There are things you should be very careful with, both in physics (don't hoard fissil material), chemistry (same with various poisons), biology (don't try to get hold of smallpox etc) - and data science (certain images are forbidden for what I think is good reasons), but I don't expect police to show up on my door because I have downloaded a publicly available data set and grepped relevant names from it and then forwarded the relevant lines to the ones I found.
Edit 2:
I also had a copy of MyDoom somewhere, I think on a disk that is broken now. Never got in trouble for that either despite telling people.
Maybe don't say it online under an identity that is strongly linked to a piece of meat that might be put punished ;-)
Downloading illegal data is not research, particularly if you're not a security researcher. Research has ethical boards for exactly this reason.
Those certain images you described are publicly available too. That doesn't make downloading them _legal_.
The fact is you've a dataset containing personal data of millions of people is obviously illegal -- why this didn't raise red flags in your mind is curious.
Edit: I'd certainly not expect police to kick your door in either, much like if you pirated a movie.
I only tested the Norway link in his post but that was legit.
(I first verified with Virustotal and then thought twice before opening the zip file.)