- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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 website presents the data it’s collected in several ways. Each known user has a profile, which contains all known aliases, pronouns, connected accounts to other platforms such as Steam and GitHub, Discord servers joined, and public messages. If you wanted to quite literally spy on a Discord user or users, Spy.pet lets you do that, for a fee.
I really don’t like seeing people gloating about harm just because it doesn’t affect them negatively, or treating it as justified because the victims were too stupid to know better.
And this “good” is not correct because the data isn’t for you, even if it was from those projects.
I just support the fundamental rule that was taught to me in one of those internet safety PSAs back in the day: The internet never forgets and whatever you posted is going to stay out there forever, good or bad.
That phrase is more often used as a post-hoc justification for harm, or to gloat, than as a legitimate warning.
I’m not sure what the difference with discord and Lemmy is. I would assume this is all being scraped as well.
Discord communities are inherently gated, Lemmy ones intentionally have everything publicly exposed. A better comparison would be between Discord and Matrix rooms, where privacy expectations could potentially vary tremendously.