"Someone might sue me for doing the right thing" is a pretty thin excuse. There's a reason it's called "doing the right thing" instead of "doing what's easiest for you."

Say I'm a lawyer, and I find out that in order to help a client of mine I have to present evidence that's extremely embarrassing to a close friend of mine. I'm am professionally and ethically obligated to present that evidence.

Now, security professionals don't have, and probably shouldn't have, fiduciary responsibilities like that. However, industries set up codes of ethics for their members precisely because there's a difference between "what's best for me right now" and "what's the right thing to do."

If the idea is to embarrass the industry into fixing these problems, an article in Forbes does a pretty good job of that.