FYI: This site claims to have harvested 4B+ Discord chats, today all yours for a price

Internet-scraping outfit Spy.pet claims to have harvested more than four billion public messages made by nearly 620 million users on more than 14,000 Discord chat servers – and is selling access to this trove. The service (for a lack of a better word) has been active since November 2023, vacuuming up user and server activity …

[Sora2566]

Ban data brokers from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

[Snowy]

Nuke it

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Make double sure with a Tsar Bomba when nuking these ne'er-do-wells from orbit.

[Zibob]

Can we please?

Sure it will be a bit MAD but at this stage its acceptable losses.

[CountCadaver]

can we cook up something better than a tsar bomba? Something with enough energy to ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere...please???

[Anonymous Coward]

Discord is committed to protecting the privacy and data of our users.

Yep, by design it seems.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even ignoring privacy laws it's more or less guaranteed the database contains illegal content.

[streaky]

Oh noes

Plis not my public discord chats. Wouldn't even trust that for training AI.

[DS999]

If your AI training goal

Is it to turn your LLM into an schizophrenic extremist that's half MAGA and half antifa, have we get a deal for you!

[anonymous boring coward]

"The service (for a lack of a better word)"

Disservice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Value?

“ Internet-scraping outfit Spy.pet claims to have harvested more than four billion public messages made by nearly 620 million users on more than 14,000 Discord chat servers – and is selling access to this trove.”

Considering the Primary user base of the Discord community, 4bn+ messags may not exactly be a trove.

There maybe less Incoherence and babbling from “ Liz Truss

Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the only conservative in the room”

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Value?

There maybe less Incoherence and babbling from “ Liz Truss

you sure about that she seems to have gone even more barkingly insane than usual for right wing loonies, and they all need rubber rooms already.

[martinusher]

Re: Value?

(She's turned up over here (US) trying to sell herself. I'm not sure what, exactly, she's selling but it involved "endorsing Trump" so draw your own conclusions.)

[CountCadaver]

Re: Value?

correspondent for Faux news? Anchor for TrumpTV? Quisling governor of East USA (formerly known as the UK - which doesn't seem very far off considering how much Sunak is toadying towards the USA and Israel...what skin do we have in the game re: Israel that justified taking RAF jets to expend expensive ammunition to shoot down drones that Israeli air defence should be more than capable of handling? - Is it that Bibi via Pegasus has some royal dirt on Sunak? Alternatively he wants his green card back so he has somewhere to slink off to post election wipeout and another Tory night of the long knives)

[David Austin]

Open or Closed servers?

The key bit of info is whether this is scraping public servers with open sign ups, which is technically trivial but a privacy/TOS Nightmare, or if they found a way to break into and scrape closed sign up servers, which would more be a Discord technical SNAFU they'd have more culpability for.

The second option is basically this.

[Anonymous Coward]

The website is hosted on Australia BroadBand

If you are from europe nothing stop you to fill GDPR request, just do a little OSINT if they don't answer then make them pay, they are not anonymous. :)

[martinusher]

Isn't there a copyright issue?

Material I post is strictly speaking a creative work of mine, I own it and its copyright. By posting it to a site I implicitly assign the copyright to the site owner, its the quid pro quo -- I get to post stuff for others to see and the site owner gets to benefit from my -- and millions of other's -- postings.

(Here we can insert cynical comments about the value of individual posts etc. etc.)

In the US we then have this notion of 'fair use' which would allow people to quote from and otherwise reference my material. What this doesn't cover is the exploitation of my information by third parties. (In theory we've got some control over how our stuff gets used by the site owner.) Anyway, as far as I'm concerned people offering this information are actually selling stolen goods.....

[CountCadaver]

Re: Isn't there a copyright issue?

You aren't assigning the copyright unless you are surrendering any claim to it.

Instead you are granting a perpetual non exclusive licence to use the material you post.