Site claims to have harvested 4B+ Discord chats, all on sale
www.theregister.com
Of course there's an enterprise plan for the Feds and AI trainers

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.

  • cm0002@lemmy.worldEnglish
    64·
    8 months ago

    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 :(

    • warm@kbin.earth
      271·
      8 months ago

      Forums need to come back, I die a little inside whenever I see a Discord server linked for support. Ugh.

    • SupraMario@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      8 months ago

      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.

    • RageAgainstTheRich@lemmy.worldEnglish
      191·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • warm@kbin.earth
        10·
        8 months ago

        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.

          • warm@kbin.earth
            3·
            8 months ago

            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!

        • tb_@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          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.

          • warm@kbin.earth
            2·
            7 months ago

            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.

    • hakaseEnglish
      22·
      8 months ago

      never use my main for anything

      Are you sure it’s your main?

      • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • jcg@halubilo.socialEnglish
          2·
          8 months ago

          Testing scams

          Any non-scams yet? Or is it safe to assume anything that looks like a scam, is one?

          • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            8 months ago

            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.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    7·
    8 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.

    The original article contains 644 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!