No, you will not be able to get a grant by stating you’re going to do a population study using stolen data.

When you do research involving people or data about them, you have to go through your institution’s Human Subjects Board (or equivalent). They’re looking for things like informed consent and that the study population in particular (as opposed to humanity in general) will see some benefit and will not be harmed. Your proposal then goes through similar reviews by the grants committee, and will probably have been looked at by your department.

Even to access survey data that’s already been collected and has been used in hundreds of studies already, you have to jump through those very necessary and important hoops.

I can’t even see commercial researchers being allowed to use stolen data if they want their work published and accepted by the scientific community. There’s not even a grey area there - it’s just straight up unethical.

There was a study done by Facebook about a decade ago where they pushed negative articles to some users and positive ones to others and then looked at the emotional content of later posts by those people, finding a small but statistically significant correlation. They were excoriated in the literature for not securing consent and for running an unethical study that, for instance, could have led to episodes of depression or self-harm in parts of vulnerable populations. I’m not sure if the authors received a penalty for their work, but it violated scientific ethics pretty severely.

You have to go through training, sometimes multiple times per year, if you’re permitted to work with human subjects data, whether you’re conducting the study or using existing work. I could see accessing a cache of stolen data to be a career ending offense.