Update 4/29: Discord has had the SpyPet site taken down because it violates Discord’s rules. In a quick test Monday, SpyPet’s website now no longer loads. Instead, it times out and displays an error message.”Scraping our services and self-botting are violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. In addition to banning the affiliated accounts, we are considering appropriate legal action,” a Discord spokesperson tells The Register. “We identified certain accounts that we believe are affiliated with the Spy.pet website, which we have subsequently banned.” SpyPet’s administrator plans to relaunch a backup site for its surveillance tool, however.Original Story 4/17: Compared to other messaging apps like Instagram or Snapchat, Discord has historically allowed bots and third-party tools to proliferate on its platform. But one surveillance tool, Spy.Pet, is tracking Discord users across the servers they’ve joined and provides detailed logs of all messages sent on servers for a starting price of about $5 worth of crypto.404 Media tried SpyPet’s service and confirmed that the messages on the site were real Discord messages. SpyPet uses bots to scrape servers; it says it’s currently tracking over 627 million Discord user accounts, more than 14,200 Discord servers, and has grabbed over 4 billion messages. Discord’s website says it hosts 19 million active servers. Regardless of SpyPet’s scope, its platform and others like it still pose obvious user privacy and safety concerns. It also goes against Discord’s Terms of Service, which states that no one can scrape Discord’s data without the company’s written permission. Unfortunately, tools like SpyPet could be used to spy on Discord friends and help stalkers, bullies, or bad actors harm existing Discord users. “Discord is committed to protecting the privacy and data of our users,” a Discord spokesperson tells PCMag. “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.”Discord’s latest Transparency Report notes it received over 56,000 bullying and harassment reports between April and June 2023 alone. Based on this report data, harassment is the biggest problem Discord users face by a large margin. “Deceptive practices” like impersonation and hateful conduct received the second and third most reports, respectively.In a February post, the creator of SpyPet said that its Coinbase Commerce crypto exchange account was locked, and SpyPet experienced a DDoS attack, though that only resulted in less than an hour of downtime, the administrator said.
Recommended by Our Editors
“I like scraping, archiving, and challenging myself,” SpyPet’s admin told 404 Media. “Discord is basically the holy grail of scraping, since Discord is trying absolutely anything to combat scraping.”SpyPet isn’t the only Discord data scraper out there. There’s also the Discord Chat Exporter, which has been downloaded over 996,000 times on GitHub. Chat Exporter has also been forked 631 times, meaning the software is being adapted and reused by others.PCMag has reached out to SpyPet for comment.Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include the update that Discord has taken action against SpyPet.
Like What You’re Reading?
Sign up for SecurityWatch newsletter for our top privacy and security stories delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
