Your Discord Data Is Being Sold to Law Enforcement and Artificial Intelligence Companies
If you use Discord, beware: your activity—both in public messages and voice channels—could be copied and sold online for as little as $5.
404Media originally published this story , reporting that an online service called Spy Pet was scraping more than 10,000 servers across Discord. The vast amount of data accumulated from this activity is used for a variety of purposes: Spy Pet sells it for as little as $5 via cryptocurrency (including Bitcoin, Ethereum or Monero) to anyone who wants it, but especially to those working in law enforcement. as well as organizations wishing to train artificial intelligence systems.
According to the report, Spy Pet essentially turns the fragmented Discord platform, where users can post to thousands of servers of their choosing, into an easy way to track a single user’s activity. Anyone who pays can choose to see what you’ve posted and where, in one convenient place. In short, it’s not good.
404Media tested Spy Pet and found that it works as advertised. While the agency cannot confirm Spy Pet’s claims of having data from more than 14,000 servers, 600 million users and 3 billion messages, it was able to successfully purchase data from the service. Apparently, you can find a specific user for about 10 cents. (I guess that’s all we’re worth.)
Spy Pet has data from many different servers, from gaming communities such as Minecraft , Among Us and Runescape themed services, to servers related to cryptocurrencies. However, 404Media reports that many of the tens of thousands of servers listed here contain no data at all and are unlikely to be cleaned.
The New Internet Privacy Challenge
Obviously this is a serious violation of user privacy, but it’s a complex story. First, Spy Pet doesn’t actually collect direct messages: your private messages between other Discord users are safe, only the messages you’ve posted on the servers themselves.
Here’s where things get tricky: These messages aren’t necessarily personal. Anyone who joins the server will be able to see everything you post and retrieve that data themselves. Theoretically, if someone were part of every Discord server you were active on, they could perform some sort of Spy Pet cleanup. It would be strange of them, but they could do it.
What Spy Pet does, of course, goes beyond this: they collect so much data and let you check all your activity for a dime in cryptocurrency. Plus, they sell it to sources you never consented to. Law enforcement probably doesn’t care about your Discord activity, but you wouldn’t expect the cops to scrutinize your Minecraft memes. The same goes for AI companies: I wouldn’t want my Discord data used to train AI models, even if those companies don’t have enough internet to train their systems on .
What You Can Do to Protect Your Discord Data
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about data that’s already been cleared: Spy Pet doesn’t seem interested in removing your data from its servers, if it’s there.
However, moving forward, keep an eye out for bots that want to join your Discord channels. This is how Spy Pet appears to have collected all this data. This isn’t always easy, as this Reddit thread explains : Some bots don’t advertise themselves as such, but appear as new accounts without identifying information or a profile picture and silently remain on the channel to collect data. Better safe than sorry: load up on suspicious lurkers.
If you control the server, consider taking some privacy measures, such as setting the server as private or changing the verification settings for the server . These changes do not guarantee privacy, but will help protect your channels from bots.
While it may not seem as public as Twitter, let’s assume that everything you post on Discord will be visible to everyone. This is a really good rule of thumb for anything that isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and for anything you post or send online in general. Even in the most secure situations, nothing on the Internet is foolproof and someone, somewhere can see what you said. If you’re joining a Discord server, keep this in mind before you start typing.