Taking pictures of people and posting them without their permission while they're at a private business is malicious in my opinion. And also illegal. There's a reason he had to hide it. Ethically it's no different to me than connecting to someone's webcam at home and uploading the photos.
On YouTube there are dozens of videos taken inside shopping malls. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W54i8i_sSvM
Does that feel malicious to you as well?
Gray area. The vast majority of those shots were at a distance and not intimate with the person at all, and someone with a giant shoulder-mounted camera at least lets people know they're being filmed.
I still don't see any intent to harm. Maybe we are thinking about different things when we talk about malice?
I think the author's intentions are what earn him some sympathy from people around here. He wasn't stealing bank info or passwords. He wasn't tracking their location or scanning their email. He was essentially doing street photography albeit with cameras owned by Apple.
The author may be naive but he's not malicious and that matters to me when I try to come up with some kind of judgement.