Spy Pet, which spied on over 600 million Discord users, is shut down, Discord considers legal action
'Spy.pet,' which extracted and sold over 4 billion messages and data from approximately 620 million Discord users, has been shut down. Discord has announced that it will suspend accounts related to Spy.pet and is considering legal action.
Discord Shuts Down 'Spy Pet' Bots That Scraped, Sold User Messages
Discord drops the hammer on data-scraping 'Spy.pet' website, says it is 'considering appropriate legal action' | PC Gamer
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/discord-drops-the-hammer-on-data-scraping-spypet-website-says-it-is-considering-appropriate-legal-action/
Discord Takes Aim At Bots Mining User Data
https://kotaku.com/discord-spy-pet-ban-minecraft-among-us-runescape-users-1851439154
In addition to pure privacy issues, Spy.pet, which scrapes and sells Discord messages, is suspected of violating the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipulates the handling of personal information collected without consent, especially children's data.
Spy.pet, which extracts over 4 billion messages from Discord and sells them for a fee, has been revealed - GIGAZINE
It has also been discovered that the collected data of Discord users was also provided to Kiwi Farms, a message board where extreme harassment and stalking has resulted in multiple suicides.
Discord responded to this issue by saying, 'We are investigating the matter and will refrain from commenting on it,' but added, 'If we determine that behavior has violated our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines, we will take appropriate action to enforce our policies.'
Then, about a week after the report, on April 26, 2024, IT news site 404 Media reported that Spy.pet had gone offline. Spy.pet was reportedly scraping 14,000 Discord servers at one point, but this number had dropped to zero by April 25.
Discord told media, 'Scraping our service and unauthorized automated self-bots using user accounts is a violation of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. Our safety team thoroughly investigated this activity and identified an account that appears to be associated with the Spy.pet website, which we have subsequently terminated.'
Meanwhile, when interviewed by 404 Media, the administrator of Spy.pet acknowledged that Discord had disabled some of the site's bots, but claimed that the counters on the Discord servers it patrolled had gone to zero because Spy.pet's code had been rewritten, and that the disappearance of the Spy.pet site was unrelated to Discord's actions, denying the reports.
Spy.pet's administrators also say that 'Spy.pet is not a harassment tool,' despite reports that the site provided data collected from Discord to Kiwi Farms.
As mentioned above, Spy.pet is believed to have violated the EU's GDPR and the US
In a post on the instant messaging app Telegram, Spy.pet said, 'spy.pet has been suspended. We will set up a backup domain and begin negotiations with the registrar within 5 hours,' meaning that it may be resurrected in the future.
However, in addition to suspending the account, Discord said it was 'considering appropriate legal action,' so 'Whether or not Spy.pet is resurrected in some form, there may be more trouble ahead,' IT news site PC Gamer pointed out.
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