• AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    It’s easy to get the impression that Discord chat messages are ephemeral, especially across different public servers, where lines fly upward at a near-unreadable pace.

    Joseph Cox at 404 Media confirmed that Spy Pet, a service that sells access to a database of purportedly 3 billion Discord messages, offers data “credits” to customers who pay in bitcoin, ethereum, or other cryptocurrency.

    Searching individual users will reveal the servers that Spy Pet can track them across, a raw and exportable table of their messages, and connected accounts, such as GitHub.

    As Cox notes, Discord doesn’t make messages inside server channels, like blog posts or unlocked social media feeds, easy to publicly access and search.

    As noted by 404 Media and confirmed by Ars, clicking on the “Request Removal” link plays a clip of J. Jonah Jameson from Spider-Man (the Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi version) laughing at the idea of advance payment before an abrupt “You’re serious?”

    Those who haven’t paid for message access can only see fairly benign public-facing elements, like stickers, emojis, and charted member totals over time.


    The original article contains 420 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • AlexanderESmith@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    Who uh… cares? The information is publicly available, that’s how it was scraped… Who would /buy/ this?

    And what would they do with the knowledge that Fartknocker72 posted sonic slash fanfics?

    • just another dev@lemmy.my-box.dev
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      7 months ago

      Who would /buy/ this?

      Have you heard of any companies in the past few years who are trying to mimic human speech? They need lots of example data to do that.

      And what would they do with the knowledge that Fartknocker72 posted sonic slash fanfics?

      While knowing that 1 specific person likes something is mostly irrelevant, once you link it to an email or real name (just wait for the next data beach), criminals could use that kinda data for blackmail.

      Furthermore, companies like Facebook and Google mostly make their money by linking people’s behaviour to their interests. They probably won’t be caught with their hand in this cookie jar, but it should show you how valuable this data (in massive quantities) is.

      • AlexanderESmith@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        criminals could use that kinda data for blackmail.

        Maybe… don’t say shit on the internet that would embarrass you if associated with your real name?

        • recursive_recursion [they/them]@programming.dev
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          7 months ago

          Maybe… don’t say shit on the internet that would embarrass you if associated with your real name?

          the problem arises from deobfuscation of identity through aggregation and correlation analysis of data