- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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 must log in or register to comment.
You guys are on public servers?
Pfft.
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 didn’t connect to those other platforms, used unique email and username, and lied about your pronouns and other info (i.e. age), how damaging could this be?
I’m forced to use discord, unfortunately, but none of the data they have on me would match my actual identity or other accounts (which all have unique emails and usernames anyway).
why’d you lie about pronouns lol. Unless your trans and haven’t come out yet I don’t see a reason to. Rest of your comment is valid though and I agree. I don’t think anything that advertising companies haven’t found out about me through other means anyway can be gotten from this data.
What @LWD@lemm.ee said, but I do think it would be about profiling (for whatever reason), and the less they know, the better.
In the US there are several laws about providing abortions to women. If one such group existed on Discord, it could be used by legal, extralegal, and extremist interests to target those women.
Trans people just aren’t official targets of legal discrimination…
…Well, not across every US state.
…Not yet, at least.
If there’s a personal information field, filling it with random noise is marginally better than leaving it blank. The pronouns field is new but I’ve noticed a lot of women friends (that have gender neutral usernames and profile pics, and no linked social media) opting to not use it or set it to he/him because having it filled out accurately caused trolls and bots and incels to fill their DMs.
Good :-) Finally people can index search and read back answers to questions for all the open source projects that only used Discord for communication (Like SerenityOS and many others).
Yeah my thoughts exactly, I don’t see what the problem is here… Are people under the assumption discord is somehow private? What do they think discord themselves are doing with all that data?
Two assumptions are made by a typical user: discord is somewhat trustworthy, the data is only controlled by discord. These are both incorrect but it is understandable why they make such an assumption about a large platform like discord. Without the knowledge of how things are scrapped, one might not think it is even possible.
I really don’t like seeing people gloating about harm just because it doesn’t affect them negatively, or treating it as justified because the victims were too stupid to know better.
And this “good” is not correct because the data isn’t for you, even if it was from those projects.
I just support the fundamental rule that was taught to me in one of those internet safety PSAs back in the day: The internet never forgets and whatever you posted is going to stay out there forever, good or bad.
That phrase is more often used as a post-hoc justification for harm, or to gloat, than as a legitimate warning.
I’m not sure what the difference with discord and Lemmy is. I would assume this is all being scraped as well.
Discord communities are inherently gated, Lemmy ones intentionally have everything publicly exposed. A better comparison would be between Discord and Matrix rooms, where privacy expectations could potentially vary tremendously.
nothing but good
This is unfortunately not the first time this has happened, there’s a whole host of “Discord data scrappers” just one search away.
Discord Users are also being tracked by Discord itself. Can’t tell you how many conversations there fuck up my youtube algorithm.
