LogInA new report sheds light on a scraping service that lets anyone view your message history across different Discord servers.
As if the earlier kerfuffle surrounding the addition of sponsored ads wasn't enough, Discord has now found itself embroiled in a new controversy revolving around a scraping service that collects the messaging platform users' data and tracks their messages shared across various servers.
As exposed in a recent writeup by the 404 Media team, the service known as Spy Pet is actively scraping Discord servers on a large scale, archiving and monitoring users' messages and activities across various servers, including their voice channel interactions. This data is then sold for as little as $5 in crypto, with the report mentioning that the purposes for which this data is sold include training AI models and assisting law enforcement agencies.
The publication further reveals that Spy Pet currently holds a database of more than 3 billion messages, gathered by tracking over 14,000 servers and 600 million users. With Discord allegedly boasting around 614 million registered users as of January 2024, this implies that the website in question is consistently monitoring the overwhelming majority of them.
As part of 404 Media's investigation, they uncovered that after submitting a payment, Spy Pet customers receive credits at a rate of $1 per 100 credits, which can then be used to look up individual users, the servers they are a part of, connected accounts, recent messages, and their activity in specific voice channels within a server.
Moreover, the team discovered that the service doesn't appear to have access to users' private messages and solely scrapes content from channels within Discord servers. Additionally, they contacted Spy Pet's creator, who described Discord as "basically the holy grail of scraping, since Discord is trying absolutely anything to combat scraping".
So, if you are a Discord user, keep in mind that nearly everything shared on the platform is likely being tracked and accessible to anyone for a price cheaper than a Big Mac.
Read 404 Media's original report here and don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.