cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14399569
Discord Users Are Being Tracked Through Data-Scraping Site
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.
You‘re not totally wrong, but mostly.
Scraping discord can happen in infinitely many ways. From the proprietary bots (which you dont have in matrix) to the proprietary backend (which you dont have in matrix) to the frontend, which could be scraped by joining room after room with a bot or federating with a ton of servers and getting their public rooms, since everything else is encrypted or not visible for non invited people.
Yes, your data on both is visible but in matrix you have a ton more control over it than ok discord.
Saying discord is basically the same as matrix is showing that someone doesnt understand how chat software works.
They didn’t say discord is basically the same as matrix though…
They said the problem is the same for both platforms in this context, which is true. Public posts can be scraped.