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Discord Shuts Down ‘Spy Pet’ Bots That Scraped, Sold User Messages (www.404media.co)

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

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Discord banned a mass of accounts that were part of a service that scraped and sold user data, including messages posted across servers and what voice channels they joined, 404 Media has learned. The move comes after 404 Media reported on the service, called Spy Pet, last week and verified it was selling access to genuine user messages ripped from Discord servers.

Since then, and especially over the last several days, the number of servers that Spy Pet says it collects data from has fluctuated, dropping from around 14,000 to 12,000, before eventually on Thursday reaching zero. As of Friday, the Spy Pet website is also unavailable, and Discord says it is considering legal action against the site.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Locking the barn after the horse is stolen.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Better than leaving the barn wide open

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

But they are leaving it open..

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

This is why they changed their API to make bots that serve too many servers (100 maybe?) become verified and go through an application process to be able to ask for the message content intent, which was part of discord bot libraries revolting for a while. But their choice was actually a pretty good middle ground. There's very good reason to allow devs to build out and actually test the functionality on their own server or couple of servers without the giant limiting factor of getting someone from discord to evaluate every feature you might possibly add.

If they're doing this through regular user accounts instead, I don't know what you expect discord to do. Public servers aren't private. Hundreds to thousands of people can see your messages. They're not that different than posting them in any other public forum. Technical limitations only go so far.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Yep. I can put together a bot in about ten minutes that silently logs everything sent.