This… this is nothing. Oh no, my messages on public servers are being scraped! Good thing I haven’t said anything in a public server I didn’t fully intend on being there forever.
The Discord haters will feast on anything. Granted, this should still be shutdown as a TOS violation but acting like this is a profound intrusion on privacy? Get ahold of yourselves. This is no different from Tweets being scraped or Facebook wall posts. Don’t add the bot to servers you don’t want it on and it’s a nonissue.
This is assuming the bots are allowed (or, at least not prevented in coming) in by the server admin and the bot is not obfuscated some how. If the bots are taking advantage of an expolit, or not being up front, then we have trouble.
the content being scraped is from users, they do not control what bots are added to servers.
It’s much more like the Cambridge Analytics scandal in that users posted content that was shared with friends but not explicitly shared publicly, but those friends then granted a third party access to all of the data.
If they could somehow make this data available to search engines. Maybe we can start being able to google random problems and actually find solutions again.
From the article, the data collection hinges on a bot going into a public server then scraping the history. Still a problem that Discord should act on, but it looks like there is no need to worry about private servers.
Does anyone know what kind of naming pattern or bot identification methods we could use? I belong to a small public server that’s there to serve a public need.
You could probably have a verification system thing that I’ve seen some public servers have where you have to complete some action before getting access to the actual channels.
I think they'll give it a genuine shot. These stalking services pop up like weeds and every time it gets some media attention they end up with significant problems not much later. dis.cool was the last well-known entry but there's been more.
If it has the same issues Lemmy does, probably not. People don’t want to build an account on a server only to find out, three months later, it’s run by tankies, or anti-piracy watchdogs, or any other number of unsavory things.
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