You're conflating "machine learning" with "machine learning based on data you hoovered up indiscriminately from non-consenting third parties".

Want to use machine learning to analyze stock price movements? For self-driving cars? You're fine.

For an example, looking at kaggle's page of open competitions, only 2 of 19 use datasets that I suspect would run into consent issues (predicting home credit default risk, and predicting demand for classified ads).