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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] 38 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)

If the Threadiverse gets large enough for data to be worth mining, they're gonna be pulling off it too, if not already.

EDIT: and as I've pointed out before, at least with current lemmy instances, it's probably not that hard to get a user's IP. I don't know how viable it is to get that for a Discord user.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You can't get a Discord user's IP address in the app itself as every interaction is proxied through Discord's backend first.

People do click on sketchy links and hand over their IP though, and Discord can't do much about those situations

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Discord bots were able to get a users IP via the verification system afaik.
And there are of course other ways to force users to do so. Its more interesting Discord themselves didnt care about these methods to ban such bots.. well its Discord, not that surprising when i think about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0h4QPqAwss

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

Look at the update comment to that video. The bot creator did it on purpose. Nothing to do with Discord's verification system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

afaik thats rather about the parallel service someone had selling the data for a subscription and getting that data from restorecord's database.
In the video it is already suspected restorecord is in on it, and the update comment proves it.

The problem with restorecord getting that data in the first place persists. I am not aware if Discord is tackling that issue at all e.g. making it against EULA and banning those bots.

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

Yes, when you go to their site and do the verification, they were able to link your IP to your discord username via their backend. This is done outside of the Discord API.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Yeah and discord is allowing it. Thats all i am saying.
Of course Restorecord is doing it on purpose. There are some valid reasons, but maybe Discord shouldt allow untrusted bot-developers like them to do so.

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