Spy.pet is harvesting your Discord history with no ability to opt-out

skilledtothegills@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 356 points –
Spy.pet is harvesting your Discord history with no ability to opt-out - Stack Diary
stackdiary.com

The service offers the ability to purchase credits through cryptocurrencies, as well as offers the data for AI training purposes.

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Excited to see Discord do absolutely nothing about this despite it being an egregious breach of their TOS.

Discord‘s TOS only really applies when they feel like it.

When someone uses 3rd party client or creates a server for Nintendo emulator

...and when they don't pay Discord under the table. Discord wouldn't be unique if this was the case either.

I think they'll give it a genuine shot. These stalking services pop up like weeds and every time it gets some media attention they end up with significant problems not much later. dis.cool was the last well-known entry but there's been more.

Can't wait for it to die and wither out. But I know they will retain a big pool of users on hostage like reddit or fb for a while.

Is matrix.org a viable alternative as of now or the near future?

If it has the same issues Lemmy does, probably not. People don't want to build an account on a server only to find out, three months later, it's run by tankies, or anti-piracy watchdogs, or any other number of unsavory things.

From the article, the data collection hinges on a bot going into a public server then scraping the history. Still a problem that Discord should act on, but it looks like there is no need to worry about private servers.

Does anyone know what kind of naming pattern or bot identification methods we could use? I belong to a small public server that’s there to serve a public need.

You could probably have a verification system thing that I've seen some public servers have where you have to complete some action before getting access to the actual channels.

"private" = small 'servers' that aren't in the public index (I think you have to have like 500 people to be eligible or something), or....?

You literally just set the server to private, which is invite-only and has slightly less features. Any public/community server is in the public index.

I've ran a discord server for 8 years and I have 0 recollection of this setting. Where is it?

it redirects to a video of the infamous Jonah Jameson’s “Are you serious?” scene from Spider-Man

No, it hosts the video. DMCA!!1!!1!!!

Edit: Italicized "hosts". Wish we could use the <em> tag.</em>

Deleted discord recently because of the ads. Glad I did as iv been looking for reason to delete it for a while.

Time to switch to alternative open source ones: Revolt, Matrix, Spacebar...

Revolt looks and functions the most like Discord.

I don't have a Discord history, so that's one problem taken care of.

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