You never know who might be collecting your data online and what they will use it for. But in the case of this data scraping service, they are not hiding the fact that they are gathering Discord user data, or that they are selling it for $5 a pop.
Discord User Data for Sale
The data scraping company in question, Spy Pet, claims that it has information from 600 million discord users. The service gathers and stores data until someone is willing to purchase them to learn about certain users. It's quite cheap too for just $5 in cryptocurrency.
It doesn't work like black market bad actors who steal data and sell them to fraudulent individuals or organizations. Spy Pet collects the data for customers like law enforcement, AI model trainers, or people who are curious about "what their friends are up to," as per Engadget.
As for the kind of information you can learn from the data, clients will be able to see what servers users participate in, the messages they have sent to others, and when they joined and left voice channels on the messaging site.
The client can search for specific users to see the information, but there are still limitations. For instance, the servers that they have joined will only show up if it is included in the 14,000 Discord servers Spy Pet claims to monitor.
Spy Pet also has access to three billion messages. When searched, the client will also be able to see connected accounts, recent messages, time stamps on the messages, as well as voice channel entry and exit times. You might think that it seems unethical.
When asked what prompted them to develop the service, the Spy Pet creator said: "I like scraping, archiving, and challenging myself," and that "Discord is basically the holy grail of scraping, since Discord is trying absolutely anything to combat scraping."
Discord is already looking into the service and deciding what action to take. "Discord is committed to protecting the privacy and data of our users," the company spokesperson expressed.
"If we determine that violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines have occurred, we will take appropriate steps to enforce our policies. We cannot provide further comments as this is an ongoing investigation."
Read Also : Discord is Rolling Out Ads Soon, Report Says
Why It Could Be Dangerous
While Discord is mainly used by people who share interests in games or hobbies, it still contains a lot of messages that are better left in private. Users will have their data sold to third parties and won't even be compensated in the process.
Plus, anyone can buy the information, including people who may intend to cause harm. Depending on what a user discloses on a platform, it would be easy to learn things about them as long as the buyer has $5 to spare.
As for selling them to AI companies, the users whose data are being sold will have no say over what information will be passed along, meaning that any sensitive information that might've been discussed within Discord could be fed to an AI model and revealed to someone who will use it.
