Yeah, probably right. If you want a great rabbit hole, look up "Common Crawl" and see how a great academic project was absolutely hijacked for pennies on the dollar to grab training data - the foundation for every LLM out there right now.
*edit: added "for-profit"
If something I worked on turned out to play a significant part in something that turned out to be that big a deal, I'd be OK with it. And nobody's stopping people from doing web-search studies with it, to this day.