Site claims to have harvested 4B+ Discord chats, all on sale

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses a website called Spy.pet that claims to have harvested over 4 billion public messages from Discord chat servers, and is selling access to this data. The article covers the following key points:

🙋 Q&A

[01] Overview of Spy.pet

1. What is Spy.pet and what does it claim to have done?

• Spy.pet is a service that claims to have harvested over 4 billion public messages from nearly 620 million users across more than 14,000 Discord chat servers.
• The service has been active since November 2023 and has been scraping user and server activity without any opt-out option.
• Spy.pet is selling access to this trove of data, allowing users to view profiles of known Discord users, including their aliases, pronouns, connected accounts, servers joined, and public messages.

2. How does Spy.pet operate and what are the pricing details?

• Users have to buy credits to look up profiles, access archives of conversations, and search for servers without a cooldown period.
• Each credit costs 1 cent, and a user profile costs 10 credits (7 for cached profiles) to access, so it costs 10 cents to look up a user.
• Spy.pet only accepts cryptocurrency for payments.
• There is also an "enterprise" option for training AI models or for federal agents, which requires contacting the site owner.

3. What is the legal and ethical status of Spy.pet's operations?

• The article suggests that Spy.pet's operations may violate aspects of the EU's GDPR regulations, such as rules on consensual data tracking, parental consent for minors, and the "right to be forgotten."
• The US FTC has also taken action against the harvesting and selling of children's data, which could be relevant to Spy.pet's activities.
• Discord is investigating the matter to determine if any violations of their terms of service or community guidelines have occurred, and will take appropriate action if necessary.

[02] Reactions and Responses

1. How have other companies and platforms responded to Spy.pet's activities?

• Coinbase has banned Spy.pet from operating on its platform, according to Spy.pet's blog post.
• Discord.io, another platform, has "pulled the cord" after a separate incident of crooks stealing 760,000 users' information.

2. How has Spy.pet responded to attacks and challenges to its operations?

• Spy.pet's website was reportedly DDoS'ed throughout February, but the owner claimed this only caused 50 minutes of downtime and minimal damage.
• The website's footer contains some unusual content, such as a link to a video of TempleOS developer Terry Davis dancing, a "Transparency" page that just says the word "transparency," and a link to a meme clip.

Overall, the article raises significant concerns about the legality and ethics of Spy.pet's data harvesting and monetization practices, and highlights the ongoing challenges of protecting user privacy in the digital age.