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Discord Users Are Being Tracked Through Data-Scraping Site (www.theregister.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

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.

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