IMG_0001

How many of these people didn't understand that anyone could see their videos?

It might be a bit difficult for the highly technical HN crowd to grasp how little many people understand technology. Not changing the title is already a big clue. Since it was a feature built-in to a native app, people might have thought their videos would not be public or only shared with friends, and lots of them might not even have understood what they were doing at all.

especially given the low view counts. I've just watched two videos with 1 view. One would assume if they were being uploaded to be shared they'd have more views.

This is my take too. This is more like finding an unsecured s3 bucket and delving through it.

It might have been "published" to YouTube, but was it really done so with informed consent?

This is unlikely to be a popular opinion here, but mass downloading of IMG_0001 videos is essentially trawling for private data by looking for an identifier of accidentally unsecured private data, akin to searching for "{ apiKey: " in github.

The apiKey thing is actually scary though, so many firebase keys...

With that said, I don't really find this metaphor to be applicable though. If these videos don't have sensitive content — and some may of course do — this is something deeply human, the ability to share experiences with others, which has been lacking in the last years with attention-grabbing social media.