#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#WebScraping#Discord: "An online service is scraping Discord servers en masse, archiving and tracking users’ messages and activity across servers including what voice channels they join, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5. Called Spy Pet, the service’s creator says it scrapes more than ten thousand Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, is also offering the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.
The news is not only a brazen abuse of Discord’s platform, but also highlights that Discord messages may be more susceptible to monitoring than ordinary users assume. Typically, a Discord user’s activity is spread across disparate servers, with no one entity, except Discord itself, able to see what messages someone has sent across the platform more broadly. With Spy Pet, third-parties including stalkers or potentially police can look up specific users and see what messages they’ve posted on various servers at once.
“Have you ever wondered where your friend hangs out on Discord? Tired of basic search tools like Discord.id? Look no further!” Spy Pet’s website reads. It claims to be tracking more than 14,000 servers, 600 million users, and includes a database of more than 3 billion messages." https://www.404media.co/a-spy-site-is-scraping-discord-and-selling-users-messages/
"A site that is scraping Discord, storing users’ activity and messages across servers including what voice channels they are active in, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5, has links to Kiwi Farms, the notorious troll and harassment site, 404 Media has found.
The news presents additional context on how the tool, called Spy Pet, is being used and by whom. 404 Media also learned that Discord has known about the scraping site since at least February, according to multiple screenshots of reports filed to Discord.
“It’s definitely distressing knowing that my information, such as servers, about me, previous usernames & message logs are publicly available—I have had more than one person harass me with the information available on the site,” one person whose information is included in the scraped Discord data told 404 Media in an online chat. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation.
On Kiwi Farms, an account called “spy.pet” has uploaded multiple dumps of Discord messages from the Spy Pet service. In at least one of these threads, they have analyzed the posts of people posting in a queer community Discord. They describe one dump as containing 916,000 messages. Another says it includes just over 220,000 messages. They have also uploaded pie charts which break down the percentage of messages on the servers written by specific users." https://www.404media.co/spy-site-selling-discord-messages-linked-to-kiwi-farms/
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