Discord Takes Down Data-Scraping Site That Tracked, Spied on Users

From PC Mag: The SpyPet site has been taken down for violating Discord's rules. In a quick test Monday, SpyPet's website 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.

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.

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