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Then I misunderstood what the question is about. With your definition and the original question in mind, it'd boil down to doing journalism. Of course that isn't illegal. But it also has some severe restrictions when it comes to individual people and their private life. You can't just doxx someone and publish everything invading their privacy. And here also different rules apply to the person investigating and the person publishing the information. But the rules for private investigators still apply.
And I still think a good part of what a private investigator does is things like finding out if someone cheated on their spouse. And that includes following people. And they better not tell how much they exactly followed someone, but instead only take a picture when they actually caught their suspect doing something wrong. Which they can't do with the premise of this story... Without a clear goal, they'd have to become more like a paparazzi. Which might be closer to illegal and the movie PI than their usual job.
And sure, other parts of their job is probably digging through social media, paper trails when it comes to money, investigating if someone embezzles money or is in breach of a contract. But I don't think it applies fully in this situation.
However, if you find a politician embezzles money, or poses for the working class and secretly owns 5 mansions in Miami, and you call them out... That's regular journalism. You just need to make sure to obtain that information legally. Or claim you got that from a mysterious source. And adhere to the standards of journalism. You can't publish when they fetch their kids from school and then someone goes ahead and uses that information to harass their 12yo daughter.
So do you know what a PI is generally hired for?
There's a narrow swatch of misbehavior that the "skeletons" would need to be, for a PI to take the case and get involved. The client would have to have some vested interest or harm done to them, or some idea that the target is doing some harm to somebody before taking the case.
If the idea was get dirt to be vindictive, the PI would not take the case.
If they did take the case and there was evidence that things were clearly criminal, (quid pro quo, malfeasance, etc) they would refer the case to actual police. They would only continue investigating if the police declined to investigate, and their purpose would be privately prosecuting the person. ( Basically filing a suit to whatever court, like you were suing the person but you prove the criminal acts and they get sentenced potentially)
If the skeleton was more of a civil harm like a breach of duty or breach of contract, the PI would gather evidence relevant to the harm, and not provide their client with irrelevant information like who their favorite callgirl is or whatever bathhouse they frequent. They would also not share info about infidelity unless their client was the spouse that was being cheated on.
Still, what you think a legitimate reason could or couldn't be probably doesn't match up with what actually would be the basis of some surveillance.
This comment is super cliff notes, and based on some PI training in Ontario Canada that I couldn't make myself complete after I realised that it would be more of the same bullshit shiftwork that I was trying to get away from 10 years ago.
OP might have a good time calling some PI firms local to them and asking to pay for a consult and fact check his narrative.
I think that's why I wrote about stalking, doxing and and the job of journalists. I think it's generally not well aligned to the job of a private investigator. I think you could do it as a journalist. Have some idea that someone feels fishy and see if you can dig something up and write an article about it. There might be some overlap with the two jobs in the methods. And OP's question came from a story idea. Maybe there are unprofessional investigators without morale? I think some professional with an interest to keep their job will certainly not cross the lines, do illegal methods and then also document it... They'll probably just refuse to do that job.
Legitimate reasons could be contrived. The question isn't what it takes to get a PI to investigate, the question should be what it would take for them to spill unrelated tea.
The first step in opening an investigation is investigate your client. Their relationship to the subject and the validity of the harms that they might have suffered or the validity of whatever narrative of criminality.
If you manage to pass that smell test, the information you get from the investigation would be severely limited to the scope of validating and proving that the harms occurred.
Again, you could get them to do stuff for you. You might not be able to get any useful information past that.