Technology

59287 readers

5184 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

180

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

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 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!