Internet-scraping outfit Spy.pet claims to have harvested more than four billion public messages made by nearly 620 million users on more than 14,000 Discord chat servers – and is selling access to this trove.
The website presents the data it’s collected in several ways. Each known user has a profile, which contains all known aliases, pronouns, connected accounts to other platforms such as Steam and GitHub, Discord servers joined, and public messages. If you wanted to quite literally spy on a Discord user or users, Spy.pet lets you do that, for a fee.
looks like i have to wait to use discord
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Updated Internet-scraping outfit Spy.pet claims to have harvested more than four billion public messages made by nearly 620 million users on more than 14,000 Discord chat servers – and is selling access to this trove.
Yes, all the info is already public in a way – Discord is kinda like IRC on steroids – and it’s a reminder that it’s not impossible to gather up all this chatter using bots for various purposes (if not surveillance then training AI models.)
Each known user has a profile, which contains all known aliases, pronouns, connected accounts to other platforms such as Steam and GitHub, Discord servers joined, and public messages.
As a side note, the footer of Spy.pet has some interesting content, such as a link to a video of TempleOS developer Terry Davis dancing, a “Transparency” page that just says the word “transparency,” and a link to the “Request Removal” page that actually just plays the meme clip of newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson laughing at Peter Parker in the 2004 movie Spider-Man 2.
Speaking of which, Spy.pet has a potentially interesting interpretation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as pointed out by the Stack Diary blog this week.
The US FTC also doesn’t take the harvesting and selling of children’s data lightly, as it just opened a lawsuit against Meta in November on this topic.
The original article contains 644 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Hmm they could have used that for good and solved Discords inherent un-searchability and un-archivability (Like old school forums used to have)
But no, they choose evil instead :(
Yea no clue why the fuck people jumped to discord over Lemmy or old school forums. It’s a shit medium for that style of postings.
Not enuf money in being good, being evil pays
Forums need to come back, I die a little inside whenever I see a Discord server linked for support. Ugh.
Good thing I have 5 Gmail accounts and never use my main for anything.
Go ahead. Track foggymailjunk@gmail.com and all my preferences.
never use my main for anything
Are you sure it’s your main?
I use it for professional and personal things. Friends, family, official forms like for work, etc. and it’s 5 characters, readable, no numbers. I could legit sell it for >$1000 and it doesn’t get any spam beyond shit from my CC offering me deals and other stuff that makes a tangible amount of sense to be on my main email.
But like, not my Lemmy or former reddit account(s), or Facebook (yes family, etc)…
I even have low value Gmail accts that I use for like… Testing scams or something.
Testing scams
Any non-scams yet? Or is it safe to assume anything that looks like a scam, is one?
Nah I’ve found plenty of non-scams. Like $1 VSTs on some random guys domain (used a visa gift card), stuff like that.
But yeah lots of scams.
Discord users are being tracked by Discord anyway.
They are, but only discord has that data. Now any dick that wants to harass somebody can get a LOT of info on people very easily.
Discord shouldn’t have all that data either but you get my point.
Always the case with public information, everything is scraped. Anyone can join a public discord server, so anyone can see every message posted there. The real crime is the lack of encryption in private messages.
Yeah but generally it’s unfeasible to find out every (public) server a particular user is in, now you can just search for them.
It, at the very least, lowers the barrier to stalking by a lot.
Yeah, but that’s an unfortunate side effect of a public internet, they tell you to be careful online for a reason. You should have no expectation of privacy when using Discord.
It says public messages are scraped in the article, but doesn’t mention anything about private ones either way so it seems at the very least, PMs are harder to get.
Yeah, they are just slapping a bot in public servers and scraping all public facing data such as profile data and chat messages. Still, no reason for PMs to be plain-text in general, but hey, that’s Discord!
Yes, it’s that discord . com website
