Using the 10/8 or any of the other RFC1918 had great potential to step on their customers toes. That is exactly why rightly or wrongly they used the 1.1.1.0/24 range. Hardware manufacturers generally used the range for interfaces that were local to the device and often only used on interfaces internal to the device. They knew this equipment would be deployed into environments where RFC1918 addressing would be used but they had no idea what RFC1918 address ranges, so using addressing from the RFC1918 networks meant potentially impacting their customer's data. They chose to instead use addressing which at the time they believed would not impact their customers.

APnic is not blameless here. They knew the issues with this space when it was assigned to them as a research network. For quite awhile they allowed Google to advertise the space and collect data on it's usage. I assume Google no longer was providing the infrastructure to do so and APnic saw an opportunity to have someone collect data for them for free.

Collecting data on traffic sent to this ip range is one thing but approving its use for a service available to the public knowing the accompanying issues much of the public would have accesssing it is in my opinion not responsible use of a research network.