The site also advertises sale of its scraped data for other purposes. “Interested in training an AI model with Discord messages? Are you a group of federal agents looking for a new source of intel? Or maybe something else? We've got you covered. Contact us and let us know how we can help,”

By the way, this only pulls from large public servers, he's just scraping messages en masse. Stuff like private servers and DMs wouldn't be affected.

[–] JohnBrownNote@hexbear.net 18 points 6 months ago

oh no somebody is reading my public toilet graffiti

[–] blakeus12@hexbear.net 5 points 6 months ago

oh ok. of it's all public information what is the big deal

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

feeling vindicated for eschewing discord

[–] Galli@hexbear.net 31 points 6 months ago

I mean you are right to eschew discord but this isn't really particular to discord. Scraping messages for something like this can be done on any public chat room regardless of which boxes you may have that it ticks; it it's floss, decentralized, nationalized, communist, on the blockchain, indie, community run, simple protocols, whatever, in the end if anyone can read it then someone can scrape it. Discord was targeted because it was popular that is all.

Unless you eschew discord because it's popular and not because it sucks in which case score one for the hipsters I guess.

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm much more worried about discord collecting this info and selling it, or building models on it, or just giving open access to the feds. This is just some person scraping 'public' chats.

Also You can't have discord delete your messages if you're in another chat with a discord bridge. You need to have a discord account associated with messages and since you aren't logged into discord there is no recourse.

Blows my mind how some 'privacy' chats have discord, telegram, etc bridges that constantly feeding them data. Looking at you GrapheneOS.

[–] The_Walkening@hexbear.net 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The market for this data (if it's got anything relevant, which it could) is law enforcement in states with abortion and trans healthcare bans/criminalization.

[–] corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net 9 points 6 months ago

Once again we are proven correct

[–] RION@hexbear.net 11 points 6 months ago

Discord kittens have had enough

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This is why on the discords I run we installed a gateway with a captcha. Pretty easy to force people to type a captcha for entry to the server.

Wouldn't stop someone manually bringing a bot in but it'll stop automated efforts. All they get is the member list from the api.