[cosmojg]

Can I legally purchase the anonymized location data of a few thousand Americans, run that through a script which associates coordinates with addresses, and publish the deanonymized results as an art piece like this?

If so, this could be a lot of fun. It would be interesting to see the political backlash, especially if the published dataset includes politicians. Perhaps, in the name of ethics, it should include only politicians, and only those who have voted against privacy legislation. Maybe we'd finally end up with something like the GDPR here in the States.

[Nextgrid]

You'd presumably get in trouble because legality is only part of the equation, the other part is how big/powerful you are and whether you have connections in the right places.

Big companies can get away with crimes while the same thing would result in successful prosecution if a little guy does it, so you might very well get in trouble even though you're doing exactly the same thing as an existing company that manages to stay out of trouble.

I however support your idea regardless of its legality (and especially if the data happens to contain details on politicians, the majority of which are responsible for the situation being as-is) and suggest you publish it anonymously (through Tor).