Four billions public Discord messages are for sale on an internet scraping service called Spy.pet.
At first sight there doesn’t seem to be much that is illegal about it. The messages were publicly accessible and there are no laws against scraping data. However, it turns out the site did disregard some laws: more on that later.
To get this amount of data the platform gathered information from 14,201 servers about 627,914,396 users.
The way in which Spy.pet organized the information could turn out to be problematic for certain users. It built a database based on user profiles which contains all known aliases, pronouns, connected accounts (such as Steam and GitHub), Discord servers joined, and public messages.
The buyers don’t need to descend into the dark dungeons of the dark web to buy this information. It’s available for anyone on the regular web.
For a search of information about a specific user, all you need is their Discord User-ID and some cryptocurrency.
To look up profiles, you’ll first have to buy credits. A credit costs $0.01 and you’ll have to buy a minimum of 500 credits.
A new search for a profile will put you back 10 credits (7 for a cached profile).
Interestingly the platform also offers an enterprise version for which interested parties are invited to contact the administrator.
Scraping data is a common practice nowadays, but there are a few rules that, when broken, will cost a lot more than a few dollars. Scraping and selling data about minors, especially without consent, is illegal in most parts of the world, including the US.
And when you are gathering data about European Union (EU) citizens, you’ll need to have a method in place for those citizens to have their information removed. Spy.pet does have a “Request Removal” button, but clicking it will show you an annoying snippet of a Spiderman movie where the news editor laughs at Peter Parker.
Discord told the Register it is probing Spy.pet to see if any action needs to be taken against the chat-harvesting service.
“Discord is committed to protecting the privacy and data of our users. We are currently investigating this matter. 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.”
