A data scraping service is selling information on what it claims to be 600 million Discord users. A report from 404 Media details Spy Pet, an online service that gathers, stores and sells troves of information from the social platform. But have no fear: It markets its services to totally trustworthy paying clients like law enforcement, AI model trainers or your average person curious about “what their friends are up to.” Why ask them when you can simply purchase and download a copy of their Discord activity?
For as little as $5 in cryptocurrency, Spy Pet lets you access data about specific users, such as which servers they participate in, what messages they’ve sent and when they joined or left voice channels. It claims to have information on an alleged 600 million users across 14,000 Discord servers and three billion messages.
As for what inspired Spy Pet, its creator suggested it’s a classic case of doing what one enjoys and pushing personal boundaries. “I like scraping, archiving, and challenging myself,” the creator told 404 Media. “Discord is basically the holy grail of scraping, since Discord is trying absolutely anything to combat scraping.”
Some people run a 5K, set a weight-loss goal or take up pickleball. Others start a social scraping service that sells data to the feds, AI companies and creepy exes. To each their own!
404 Media says the database lets you search for specific users. For each search result, a page shows the servers the user has joined (at least among those Spy Pet monitors), their connected accounts, a table showing their recent messages (including the server name, time stamps and the message itself) and their voice channel entry and exit times. Paying customers can conveniently export their prey’s — or “friend’s” — chats into a CSV file.
Discord says it’s investigating Spy Pet and weighing its options. “Discord is committed to protecting the privacy and data of our users,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to Engadget. “We are currently investigating this matter. If we determine that violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines have occurred, we will take appropriate steps to enforce our policies. We cannot provide further comments as this is an ongoing investigation.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/creepy-monitoring-service-sells-searchable-discord-user-data-for-as-little-as-5-170228224.html?src=rss