The administrator of the disputed site intends to continue its activities regardless of possible legal action.
The popular Discord successfully blocked several accounts associated with the Spy Pet site, which collected billions of public messages from users.
We first reported on Spy Pet on April 18, shortly after the release of the 404 Media investigation, in which journalist Joseph Cox confirmed that the service extracts confidential messages from Discord users on various servers.
After the media hype, Discord management announced that it will conduct a detailed investigation into Spy Pet, and will take appropriate measures if a violation of the service's rules is found.
As it turned out, the site did indeed scrape user messages from 14,000 Discord servers, but thanks to the actions of the platform's security team, the number of these servers was reduced to zero on April 25.
Experts found out that scraper bots simply joined open servers, or those that were relatively easy to access. And due to the large number of such servers, Spy Pet could provide customers with very extensive information about what is happening on the platform.
Discord representatives said that the deleted accounts had access, in fact, only to publicly available information, and not to secret chats with confidential data.
In the investigation of 404 Media, it was also mentioned that the data obtained could be used for Internet harassment of specific people, but the Spy Pet administrator denies that his site was used by anyone for such purposes.
However, Spy Pet's actions may have violated the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). According to representatives of Discord, in addition to blocking accounts associated with Spy Pet, the company is also considering legal action.
After the site was suspended, a message about installing the backup domain "spying[.]pet"has already appeared in the official Spy Pet Telegram channel. This indicates the return of the service after liquidation, but this may be very fraught for the owner himself, given the possible sanctions announced by Discord management.
The popular Discord successfully blocked several accounts associated with the Spy Pet site, which collected billions of public messages from users.
We first reported on Spy Pet on April 18, shortly after the release of the 404 Media investigation, in which journalist Joseph Cox confirmed that the service extracts confidential messages from Discord users on various servers.
After the media hype, Discord management announced that it will conduct a detailed investigation into Spy Pet, and will take appropriate measures if a violation of the service's rules is found.
As it turned out, the site did indeed scrape user messages from 14,000 Discord servers, but thanks to the actions of the platform's security team, the number of these servers was reduced to zero on April 25.
Experts found out that scraper bots simply joined open servers, or those that were relatively easy to access. And due to the large number of such servers, Spy Pet could provide customers with very extensive information about what is happening on the platform.
Discord representatives said that the deleted accounts had access, in fact, only to publicly available information, and not to secret chats with confidential data.
In the investigation of 404 Media, it was also mentioned that the data obtained could be used for Internet harassment of specific people, but the Spy Pet administrator denies that his site was used by anyone for such purposes.
However, Spy Pet's actions may have violated the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). According to representatives of Discord, in addition to blocking accounts associated with Spy Pet, the company is also considering legal action.
After the site was suspended, a message about installing the backup domain "spying[.]pet"has already appeared in the official Spy Pet Telegram channel. This indicates the return of the service after liquidation, but this may be very fraught for the owner himself, given the possible sanctions announced by Discord management.
