Death is just an "emotionally loaded topic"? I think it's perfectly reasonable to have principles, but value those principles less than human life. In fact, I wish more people did that.
There are plenty of cases where we can and do make exceptions to personal privacy for public benefit, under certain guidelines. E.g. medical data is one of the few things that's actually private by law in the US, but we still find way to make aggregate data available for epidemiological studies. Location data is absolutely sensitive data, but there are valid reasons to make subsets of it available for the public benefit.
There are plenty of cases where we can and do make exceptions to personal privacy for public benefit, under certain guidelines. E.g. medical data is one of the few things that's actually private by law in the US, but we still find way to make aggregate data available for epidemiological studies. Location data is absolutely sensitive data, but there are valid reasons to make subsets of it available for the public benefit.