This article is kinda funny, the person who made the website is pretty clearly just some tech dude trying to make money off something he did for fun.
The site also advertises sale of its scraped data for other purposes. “Interested in training an AI model with Discord messages? Are you a group of federal agents looking for a new source of intel? Or maybe something else? We've got you covered. Contact us and let us know how we can help,”
By the way, this only pulls from large public servers, he's just scraping messages en masse. Stuff like private servers and DMs wouldn't be affected.
oh no somebody is reading my public toilet graffiti
oh ok. of it's all public information what is the big deal
I mean you are right to eschew discord but this isn't really particular to discord. Scraping messages for something like this can be done on any public chat room regardless of which boxes you may have that it ticks; it it's floss, decentralized, nationalized, communist, on the blockchain, indie, community run, simple protocols, whatever, in the end if anyone can read it then someone can scrape it. Discord was targeted because it was popular that is all.
Unless you eschew discord because it's popular and not because it sucks in which case score one for the hipsters I guess.
I'm much more worried about discord collecting this info and selling it, or building models on it, or just giving open access to the feds. This is just some person scraping 'public' chats.
Also You can't have discord delete your messages if you're in another chat with a discord bridge. You need to have a discord account associated with messages and since you aren't logged into discord there is no recourse.
Blows my mind how some 'privacy' chats have discord, telegram, etc bridges that constantly feeding them data. Looking at you GrapheneOS.
The market for this data (if it's got anything relevant, which it could) is law enforcement in states with abortion and trans healthcare bans/criminalization.
This is why on the discords I run we installed a gateway with a captcha. Pretty easy to force people to type a captcha for entry to the server.
Wouldn't stop someone manually bringing a bot in but it'll stop automated efforts. All they get is the member list from the api.
