Spy Pet, a service that sold access to a rich database of allegedly more than 3 billion Discord messages and details on more than 600 million users, has seemingly been shut down.
404 Media, which broke the story of Spy Pet’s offerings, reports that Spy Pet seems mostly shut down. Spy Pet’s website was unavailable as of this writing. A Discord spokesperson told Ars that the company’s safety team had been “diligently investigating” Spy Pet and that it had banned accounts affiliated with it.
“Scraping our services and self-botting are violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines,” the spokesperson wrote. “In addition to banning the affiliated accounts, we are considering appropriate legal action.” The spokesperson noted that Discord server administrators can adjust server permissions to prevent future such monitoring on otherwise public servers.
Kiwi Farms ties, GDPR violations
The number of servers monitored by Spy Pet had been fluctuating in recent days. The site’s administrator told 404 Media’s Joseph Cox that they were rewriting part of the service while admitting that Discord had banned a number of bots. The administrator had also told 404 Media that he did not “intend for my tool to be used for harassment,” despite a likely related user offering Spy Pet data on Kiwi Farms, a notorious hub for doxxing and online harassment campaigns that frequently targets trans and non-binary people, members of the LGBTQ community, and women.
Even if Spy Pet can somehow work past Discord’s bans or survive legal action, the site’s very nature runs against a number of other Internet regulations across the globe. It’s almost certainly in violation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As pointed out by StackDiary, Spy Pet and services like it seem to violate at least three articles of the GDPR, including the “right to be forgotten” in Article 17.
Ars was unsuccessful in reaching the administrator of Spy Pet by email and Telegram message. Their last message on Telegram stated that their domain had been suspended and a backup domain was being set up. “TL;DR: Never trust the Germans,” they wrote.
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. But someone claims to be catching and compiling that data and is offering packages that can track more than 600 million users across more than 14,000 servers.
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. Ominously, Spy Pet lists more than 86,000 other servers in which it has “no bots,” but “we know it exists.”
An example of Spy Pet’s service from its website. Shown are a user’s nicknames, connected accounts, banner image, server memberships, and messages across those servers tracked by Spy Pet.
Spy Pet
Statistics on servers, users, and messages purportedly logged by Spy Pet.
Spy Pet
An example image of the publicly available data gathered by Spy Pet, in this example for a public server for the game Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.
Spy Pet
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. But many Discord users many not expect their messages, server memberships, bans, or other data to be grabbed by a bot, compiled, and sold to anybody wishing to pin them all on a particular user. 404 Media confirmed the service’s function with multiple user examples. Private messages are not mentioned by Spy Pet and are presumably still secure.
Spy Pet openly asks those training AI models, or “federal agents looking for a new source of intel,” to contact them for deals. 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?” Users of Spy Pet, however, are assured of “secure and confidential” searches, with random usernames.
This author found nearly every public Discord he had ever dropped into for research or reporting in Spy Pet’s server list. 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. But as an indication of the reach of Spy Pet’s scraping, it’s an effective warning, or enticement, depending on your goals.
Ars has reached out to Spy Pet for comment and will update this post if we receive a response. A Discord spokesperson told Ars that the company is investigating whether Spy Pet violated its terms of service and community guidelines. It will take “appropriate steps to enforce our policies,” the company said, and could not provide further comment.
Discord had long been strongly opposed to ads, but starting this week, it’s giving video game makers the ability to advertise to its users. The introduction of so-called Sponsored Quests marks a notable change from the startup’s previous business model, but, at least for now, it seems much less intrusive than the ads shoved into other social media platforms, especially since Discord users can choose not to engage with them.
Discord first announced Sponsored Quests on March 7, with Peter Sellis, Discord’s SVP of product, writing in a blog post that users would start seeing them in the “coming weeks.” Sponsored Quests offer PC gamers in-game rewards for getting friends to watch a stream of them playing through Discord. Discord senior product communications manager Swaleha Carlson confirmed to Ars Technica that Sponsored Quests launch this week.
Enlarge/ Discord shared this image in March as an example of the new type of ads.
The goal is for video games to get exposure to more gamers, serving as a form of marketing. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that it viewed a slide from a slideshow Discord shows to game developers regarding the ads that reads: “We’ll get you in front of players. And those players will get you into their friend groups.”
Sellis told WSJ that Discord will target ads depending on users’ age, geographic location data, and gameplay. The ads will live on the bottom-left of the screen, but users can opt out of personalized promotions for Quests that are based on activity or data shared with Discord, Swaleha Carlson, senior product communications manager at Discord, told Ars Technica.
“Users may still see Quests, however, if they navigate to their Gift Inventory and/or through contextual entry points like a user’s friends’ activity. They’ll also have the option to hide an in-app promotion for a specific Quest or game they’re not interested in,” she said.
“Users may still see Quests, however, if they navigate to their Gift Inventory and/or through contextual entry points like a user’s friends’ activity. They’ll also have the option to hide an in-app promotion for a specific Quest or game they’re not interested in. “
Discord already tested the ads in May with Lucasfilm Games and Epic Games. Discord users were able to receive Star Wars-themed gear in Fortnite for getting a friend to watch them play Fortnite on PC for at least 15 minutes.
Jason Citron, Discord co-founder and CEO, told Bloomberg in March that the company hopes that one day “every game will offer Quests on Discord.”
Discord used to be anti-ads
It may be a nuisance for users to have to disable personalized promotion for Sponsored Quests when they never asked for them, but it should bring long-term users at least some comfort that their data purportedly doesn’t have to contribute to the marketing. However, it’s unclear if Discord may one day change this. The fact that the platform is implementing ads at all is somewhat surprising. Discord named its avoidance of advertising as one of its key differentiators from traditional social media platforms as recently as late January.
In March 2021, Citron told WSJ that Discord had eschewed ads until that point because ads would be intrusive, considering Discord’s purpose of instant back-and-forth communication and people’s general distaste for viewing ads and having their data shared with other companies.
“We really believe we can build products that make Discord more fun and that people will pay for them. It keeps our incentives aligned,” Citron told WSJ at the time.
That same year, Citron, in response to a question about why being ad-free is important to Discord, told NPR: “We believe that people’s data is their data and that people should feel comfortable and safe to have conversations and that their data is not going to be used against them in any way that is improper.”
Sponsored Quests differs from other types of ads that would more obviously disrupt Discord users’ experiences, such as pop-up ads or ads viewed alongside chat windows.
A tight-rope to walk
Beyond Sponsored Quests, Discord, which launched in 2015, previously announced that it would start selling sponsored profile effects and avatar decorations in the Discord Shop. In March, Discord’s Sellis said this would arrive in the “coming weeks.” Discord is also trying to hire more than 12 people to work in ad sales, WSJ said Saturday, citing anonymous “people familiar with [Discord’s] plans.”
Discord’s Carlson declined to comment to Ars on whether or not Discord plans to incorporate other types of ads into Discord. She noted that Sponsored Quests “are currently in the pilot phase” and that the company will “continue to iterate based on what we learn.”
In 2021, Discord enjoyed a nearly three-times revenue boost that it attributed to subscription sales for Nitro, which adds features like HD video streaming and up to 500MB uploads. In March, Citron told Bloomberg that Discord has more than 200 million monthly active users and that the company will “probably” go public eventually.
The publication, citing unnamed “people with knowledge of the matter,” also reported that Discord makes over $600 million in annualized revenue. The startup has raised over $1 billion in funding and is reported to have over $700 million in cash. However, the company reportedly isn’t profitable. It also laid off 17 percent of staffers, or 170 workers, in January.
Meanwhile, ads are the top revenue generator for many other social media platforms, such as Reddit, which recently went public.
While Discord’s first real ads endeavor seems like it will have minimal impact on users who aren’t interested in them, it brings the company down a tricky road that it hasn’t previously navigated. A key priority should be ensuring that any form of ads doesn’t disrupt the primary reasons people like using Discord. As it stands, Sponsored Quests might already put off some users.
“I don’t want my friendships to be monetized or productized in any way,” Zack Mohsen, a reported long-time user and computer hardware engineer based in Seattle, told WSJ.
Updated April 1, 2024 at 5: 32 p.m. ET to add information and comment from Discord.
