[throwawaymath]

No. You can trade on material, nonpublic data as much as you'd like. Insider trading is not illegal unless you're breaking a confidentiality agreement or fiduciary duty.

If you manage to discover confidential data in a way that does not compromise such an agreement or duty, you're fine. Obviously you should engage with an attorney instead of taking legal advice from a random HN comment, but there's really no issue with this. Information asymmetry is a fundamental part of the market and not illegal on its own.

Source: I used to work in financial forecasting using significant amounts of alternative data.