A service called Spy Pet is scraping Discord servers, archiving and tracking users' messages and activity, and then selling access to that data.
Spy Pet scrapes more than 10,000 Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, it offers the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.
Spy Pet claims to be tracking more than 14,000 servers, 600 million users, and includes a database of more than 3 billion messages.
@jake4480 This only affects public #Discord servers whose channels are visible to everyone joining (including #SpyPet’s army of #selfbots, which range from blank-avatar accounts created by SpyPet itself to accounts stolen from other users via the usual scams like free Nitro). Private servers with clever #gatekeeping / #verification mechanisms (where the chat channels are hidden from view unless you get manually verified by the moderators) are immune to this message-scraping model.
@Jayenkai very true. There's odd ways around it, I saw something the other day that forces the robots to not scrape. But it's really convoluted and yeah, you're right -- they do ignore those robot.txt files.
@blindcoder@Jayenkai for the people that care about their stuff getting scraped, it sucks.. I know Dark Visitors does some, I found the one I spotted the other day, a Rust thing that is supposedly more effective. Artists poisoning their digital work with things to mess up the AI, etc. Any way of pushing back.
@blindcoder@jake4480 So you should see my server logs over the past year, as the number of A.I. LLM's increases and each and every one is individually crawling my server, one by one. I feel like I'm paying about 3% server-costs for users, and the other 97% for A.I. bots scraping the bejesus out of my many sites.
Add comment