As first reported by StackDiary and The Register, a website called Spy.pet claims to be scraping billions of public Discord messages by some 620 million users and selling individual messages and profiles in code

Spyware has been selling the messages and profiles of billions of users.

Spy.pet ties message logs to the users who sent them, and also collects Discord aliases and linked social media and Steam accounts. corporate option" for those who wish to train their own AI models on the site's message library.

The site presents this as a potential option for "federal agents looking for new sources." [The owners of Spy.pet seem to take a certain delight in the potential opposition to the business: the "request for removal" link on the site leads only to a .gif of JJ Jameson laughing in Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man 2. I don't think J.K. Simmons is that cavalier about my privacy.

In a statement released to both Register and StackDiary, Discord revealed that it is investigating Spy.pet for possible violations of its terms of service: "Discord is committed to protecting user privacy and data. We are currently investigating this matter, and Discord is committed to protecting the privacy and data of our users. We will not comment further on this matter as it is currently under investigation."

As StackDiary points out, Spy.pet is also likely in violation of several articles of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. While the U.S. does not have such great consumer protections, the Register argues that Spy.pet could also be liable in the U.S. because of the possibility of Spy.pet selling children's data.

The crypto-fueled private sector surveillance and harassment machine is the nice new nightmare of the 2020s, and I hope it gets shut down. But it is a valuable reminder that Discord should not be treated like a private thing. What you say on a small invite-only server with friends will probably stay there unless one of your friends shares it or reports the message to the Discord mod team, but to be truly safe, chatting on Discord is publicly posted on social media to be considered the same as posting publicly on social media.

So don't leak military classified information on the Discord server, or say anything on Discord that you wouldn't want to see screenshotted and posted on Twitter or Reddit. Of course, it would also help if we stopped creating Discord servers for things that shouldn't be on Discord servers.