Didn't want to respond to all of this, but might as well. The main thing is that, regardless of the legality of sharing publicly available information, the obsessive focus on finding twisted humor in the shameful activities of another is not "normal" or "healthy" behavior. If you mentioned one of the people covered in this thread to someone on the street, they'd probably laugh along at first, but then they'd grow visibly uncomfortable with the way you want to continue to dwell on things. In the area where I live, embarrassing behavior in a public place is the kind of thing you ignore and shun. The instinct isn't continually immerse yourself in it but to get back to normal life as quickly as possible. At the end of the day it's the moral grandstanding in the cringe threads (e.g., they perform a healthy social function of encouraging better behavior from undesireables, "Self-policing the community," etc.) that is ridiculous. You do have the right to participate in cringe threads and to laugh at people, but you should be honest about the fact that it is for your own gratification. Man is free to act, even when it is immoral. It's mostly the self-righteousness about it that pisses me off nowadays; the activity itself is wrong, yeah, but again people have free will.
At the end of the day the whole lolcow phenomenon just isn't something that "normal" people whom people are allegedly representing get caught up with. The average family man who would fully agree with you on the cringe-worthiness and shame of the people involved would still not be comfortable in a thread based entirely on it.