Be careful if you use Discord. Activity on both public messages and voice channels can be scraped and sold online for as little as $5.
404Media originally broke the story, reporting that an online service called Spy Pet was scraping more than 10,000 servers across Discord. The huge amount of data accumulated from this activity is used for various purposes. Spy Pet sells it for as low as $5 via cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero) to anyone who wants it, especially those in law enforcement. The same goes for organizations looking to train their AI systems.
According to the report, Spy Pet essentially turns Discord's fragmented platform, which allows users to post to thousands of servers of their choice, into an easy way to target a single user's activity. Anyone who pays can see what they post in one convenient place on her. In short, it's not good.
404Media tested Spy Pet and found it to work as advertised. Although the outlet cannot confirm Spy Pet's claims that it has data on more than 14,000 servers, 600 million users and 3 billion messages, it has successfully purchased data from the service. did. Apparently, you can search for a specific user for about 10 cents. (I think that's all we're worth.)
Spy Pet contains data from various servers and gaming communities. Mine Craft, between usand runescape-Themed service, server related to cryptocurrencies. However, 404Media reports that many of the tens of thousands of servers listed here have no data at all and are unlikely to be scraped.
Emerging issues regarding privacy on the internet
This is clearly a serious violation of user privacy, but the story is complicated. First, Spy Pet doesn't actually collect your direct girlfriend messages. Private her messages between other she Discord users are safe and are just messages posted on the server itself.
Here comes the problem. These messages are not necessarily private. Anyone who joins the server can see everything you post, and can also retrieve that data themselves. In theory, if someone joined every Discord server you were active on, that person could perform some sort of unique spy scraping. It would be strange for them, but they could do it.
What Spy Pet does, of course, goes beyond that. They're doing scraping. So You will be able to store large amounts of data and check out all your activities for just 1 cent of cryptocurrency. Additionally, they are selling it to a vendor you have not consented to. Law enforcement probably doesn't care about your Discord activity, but you never expected them to scrutinize your Minecraft memes. The same is true for AI companies. I don't want my boyfriend's Discord data to be used to train AI models, even though these companies lack the internet to train their systems.
What you can do to protect your Discord data
Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about data that's already been scraped. Spy Pet doesn't seem interested in deleting data if it exists on its servers.
However, from now on, be wary of bots trying to join your Discord channels. This is how Spy Pet appears to have collected all this data in the first place. This isn't always easy, as this Reddit thread explains. Although some bots do not advertise themselves as such, they appear as new accounts with no identifying information or profile picture and remain silently on the channel to collect data. It's better to be safe than sorry: take out suspicious lurkers.
If you control the server, consider taking privacy steps, such as setting the server as private or changing the server's verification settings. These changes don't guarantee privacy, but they can help keep bots away from your channels.
Although it may not feel as public as Twitter, assume that everyone can see everything you post on Discord. This is a very good rule of thumb for anything you post or send online, not just anything that isn't end-to-end encrypted. Even in the safest of situations, nothing on the Internet is foolproof, and someone, somewhere could see what you say. If you're joining a Discord server, keep that in mind before you start typing.