Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Feed Link: https://www.engadget.com/
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Title: Creepy monitoring service sells searchable Discord user data for as
little as $5

Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 17:02:28 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/creepy-monitoring-se...

A data scraping service is selling information on what it claims to be 600
million Discord users. A report from 404 Media details Spy Pet, an online
service that gathers, stores and sells troves of information from the social
platform. But have no fear: It markets its services to totally trustworthy
paying clients like law enforcement, AI model trainers or your average person
curious about ΓÇ£what their friends are up to.ΓÇ¥ Why ask them when you can
simply purchase and download a copy of their Discord activity?

For as little as $5 in cryptocurrency, Spy Pet lets you access data about
specific users, such as which servers they participate in, what messages
theyΓÇÖve sent and when they joined or left voice channels. It claims to have
information on an alleged 600 million users across 14,000 Discord servers and
three billion messages.

As for what inspired Spy Pet, its creator suggested itΓÇÖs a classic case of
doing what one enjoys and pushing personal boundaries. ΓÇ£I like scraping,
archiving, and challenging myself,ΓÇ¥ the creator told 404 Media. ΓÇ£Discord
is basically the holy grail of scraping, since Discord is trying absolutely
anything to combat scraping.ΓÇ¥

Some people run a 5K, set a weight-loss goal or take up pickleball. Others
start a social scraping service that sells data to the feds, AI companies and
creepy exes. To each their own!

404 Media says the database lets you search for specific users. For each
search result, a page shows the servers the user has joined (at least among
those Spy Pet monitors), their connected accounts, a table showing their
recent messages (including the server name, time stamps and the message
itself) and their voice channel entry and exit times. Paying customers can
conveniently export their preyΓÇÖs ΓÇö or ΓÇ£friendΓÇÖsΓÇ¥ ΓÇö chats into a
CSV file.

Discord says itΓÇÖs investigating Spy Pet and weighing its options.
ΓÇ£Discord is committed to protecting the privacy and data of our users,ΓÇ¥ a
company spokesperson wrote in an email to Engadget. ΓÇ£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.ΓÇ¥

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/creepy-monitoring-se...
user-data-for-as-little-as-5-170228224.html?src=rss

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