Discord Shuts Down ‘Spy Pet’ Bots That Scraped, Sold User Messages
Discord Shuts Down ‘Spy Pet’ Bots That Scraped, Sold User Messages
After 404 Media reported on the service last week, Discord has now shut down a mass of scraping accounts and says it is considering legal action.
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.
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.
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
Discord bots were able to get a users IP via the verification system afaik.
And there are of course other ways to force users to do so. Its more interesting Discord themselves didnt care about these methods to ban such bots.. well its Discord, not that surprising when i think about it.
Permanently Deleted
I'll be honest, the return on Bonzai Buddy was indeed on my internet distopia bingo card.
Account walled
The spy[.]pet domain got taken down, but soon after the developer published the same website under a new domain spying[.]pet...
404 Media should also investigate what they do with all those phone numbers they collect, as a security measure.
What would you do if you found out I've been copying all your comments for the past week, changing them slightly, and then reposted them on a certain website without giving you any credit whatssoever?
Why are you so intent on giving them s**t about their licensing of their comments?
They cause harm to no one, they feel better because doing so is relevant to them.I might be wrong, but your question seems asked in bad faith: I am under tbe impression that most people on lemmy servers have at least a basic understanding of the privacy and copyright infringements of the training of AI models.
Their will to license their comment probably has little to do with the very unlikely individual actions you describe and more to do with data licensing from big corporate entities.
What would you do if you found out I’ve been copying all your comments for the past week, changing them slightly, and then reposted them on a certain website without giving you any credit whatssoever?
It's so weird how some people get so bent out of shape over this.
At the end of the day, its just a fucking link.