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

submitted 5 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] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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] 1 points 5 months ago

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

this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024

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