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

submitted 5 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[-] warm@kbin.earth 31 points 5 months ago

Discord users are being tracked by Discord anyway.

[-] RageAgainstTheRich@lemmy.world 18 points 5 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 points 5 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.

[-] tb_@lemmy.world 1 points 5 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 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 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.

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] warm@kbin.earth 3 points 5 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!

this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024

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