It's likely that users did consent when they checked the "I've read the terms and conditions" checkbox when signing up.

It's possible that the dating website got 1 million users and couldn't find product market fit. They then pivoted to selling their users data.

There are plenty of scraped dating website datasets lying around.

Yes, but I suppose you can't use them in a publication on Nature if they are scrapped illegally.

This dataset directly from the dating website

Ha. Hahaha. I wish. I'm sorry to laugh, but a ton of ML papers are based on illegally-scraped datasets of one form or another, unless they use strictly blessed datasets (Imagenet2012 being the gold standard mostly-useless-in-the-real-world dataset).

OpenAI's Jukebox is based on illegal large-scale gathering of copyrighted material, for example.

What does "scrapped illegally" mean?

I've never encountered this term. I can see how scrapping might be a violation of some websites terms of use, but I've never seen "scrapped illegally" used. Do you have any examples?

- I have personal information on linkedin

- I have agreed with LinkedIn that they may use my personal information for a set of well-defined uses (basically things on the LinkedIn website/service, and some 3rd party services they use to run the website/service).

- LinkedIn promise that they will not share my identifiable personal information with 3rd parties for any use

- LinkedIn's terms of use state that nobody may scrape personal information from their website without their consent. This is how they enforce the previous promise to me

- Some business comes along and scrapes my personal information for their own business use.

- That business knows that LinkedIn prohibit this, and they know that I have only consented for my personal information to be used for LinkedIn itself.

- This is probably "unlawful" (as they're interfering in my contract with LinkedIn), and certainly violating my GDPR rights. Sadly, it's hard to point at a specific example as guidance doesn't have a section titled "Can I ignore individual's explicit opting out of my usage?".

Hence, illegal scraping, as willing violating the GDPR is illegal.

Just to head-off the very common response: Personal, individual, use is not covered by the GDPR. So there is nothing wrong with you going and using my LinkedIn data for any personal reasons. The moment you try to use it for business purposes though, that's illegal.

Just like the US isn't the entire world, neither is EU.

Well, pictures of faces could be considered personal data per GDPR. Scraping that data without each person's approval could be illegal regardless of any terms of use.

1) Web scraping is not "illegal"

2) I haven't the slightest clue why you think scraped data can't be used in a publication - some results from first page of Google Scholar:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004209802091819...