If we try to prosecute whether it's viewed for pleasure or not, then we are trying to prosecute thought crimes. We are trying to prosecute someone's state of mind there.
No, just viewing someone's death does not violate privacy laws, in my opinion. But if you share the material with others, than it might be right to make that illegal, in my opinion.
We should take such material down, but nobody should ever see jail time or any form of punishment for viewing or reading anything, in a free society. Any situation otherwise is a hallmark of a police state, and it shows how far the Overton window has shifted. How much the frog has boiled over the years.
And seeing the harm caused by the War on Drugs and countless other cases of overcriminalization, it may well be we are living in a de-facto police state, and unaware of it. We've internalized and accepted loss of our fundamental liberties over the years. And this trend started roughly around 1980 or so.