Transcription
With 63 billion messages, 285 TB of attachments, and 95,000 Discord servers being scraped, there's a website called Search Cord that allows you to search messages across Discord. And people are worried. Is this going to be Discord's next big spying tool like spy.pet? To answer that, I'm going to look into the website, but I'm also going to explain how you should change how you use Discord in the future and why you should be mad at Discord.
Now, first, so we understand everything. The reason why people are worried about Search Cord is the fact that there used to be a website called spy.pet. And what spy.pet allowed you to do is you could search for people's messages across Discord, but you could also search for people's profiles. And this is a problem because people would use this for harassment. You could find someone that you want to stalk across Discord and you know what servers they're in. And this data was sold to anyone that would buy credits through spy. So spy.pet was making money by selling your data. People don't like their privacy being invaded on Discord, and the Search Cord thing kind of feels similar because what's stopping someone from searching up your name, finding things you're talking about?
But believe it or not, things are a little bit different. Maybe for better or for worse. Because the point of Search Cord right from the beginning isn't really meant for harassment. It's more to fix a problem that's happening on the internet recently. You see, with old forums dying out and AI bots taking over the internet, Discord has become the go-to place for discussion for many communities. For example, let's say there's like a GameCube modding Discord server. Imagine there's only a Discord server. There's no other information on the internet. You can't just search up your question on Google and then magically get your answer from a Discord server. In fact, you'd have to join the Discord server, or you'd have to hope and pray that someone made a Reddit thread about it, or someone has their own dedicated website. And what's happening more and more is that for specific hobbies, you don't get information from public websites or from subreddits. Instead, the information is hidden in a Discord server that you can't just Google the answer for. And there might be like 20 Discord servers talking about your hobby or your GameCube or whatever that you have to search to find your one single answer. It makes everything harder if you're just looking for information.
So, that's the point of Search Cord. And I'm going to be honest, when I first tried it, I was pretty impressed. You can search for the extension PDF and you could search for MacBook PDFs. You get some MacBook Discord servers, but then there's electronics repair school. They have a chat by someone who says MacBook Pro and it leads to a PDF. So, if you want to do electronics repair, the information is right there. Oh, that actually rhymed. That was pretty sick. Uh, but I'm not buying it, right? People are going to use it for bad. I wanted to search and stalk one person on Discord, myself, cuz I'm egotistical. And you'll notice if you try looking for messages by a specific user, it stops you. It says, "To prevent doxing, we do not allow searching by author without a guild ID or channel ID." So, you're unable to just track people across Discord by searching their messages and seeing if it's on this website. So far, things are looking pretty damn good.
Except when you dig a little bit deeper, the concerns start popping up. If I go to my Discord server, there's a whole bunch of channels. And one that caught my eye is this whimsical wobbin channel. Now, this was some sort of event that we had last May, May 24th, 2024. And the thing with this channel, if I just copy the good old ID up here and I paste it in my Discord server, you'll notice that this channel was deleted on August 5th. So, all of the messages in here are deleted information. And the reason why they were able to see my deleted channel is because I asked them, "How long ago did you start this?" 2022 to 2023, which isn't really a problem. I mean, the people in here are just doing an event. They're running commands. The problem is, what could possibly be saved? There's been a handful of times on my Discord server in the general chat where someone gets hacked. They're panicking. They use their phone to take a photo of their monitor, and the photo has like their whole full name on it. It has their personal email. It has all this information that they probably don't want on the internet. So, we delete it. I've also, I don't know why this happened, but I've also had people who have accidentally sent screenshots of their home address. Don't ask me how they managed to mess that up, but they managed to send their home address in the Discord server, so we delete it. But the problem is that deleted messages get saved. So, that information of that person's address could very well be on this website.
Now, the thing with my server is that we have a whole bunch of people yapping, but we also do have like a support thread. We have like an FAQ to give people information. So, it kind of makes sense if people are looking for answers to their questions. Then, my server being archived, it makes sense. It'd be different if I was like an e-girl server, for example. And then that gave me a really bad idea. I went back to Search Cord and I searched for EAgirl. And it turns out that Search Cord has a whole bunch of different egirl servers that they have also archived. Now, riddle me this for a second. When I join this EAGIL server, what sort of questions are popping up that I I need archived to answer my burning questions? And I guess my burning question is why in the absolute do people have to use Discord for adult content? I literally could not have picked a worse Discord server to click on. But this also raises another concern. If we're looking for egirl servers, and I'm some weirdo on the internet, I could just search for like face reveal and if it has an image. In fact, they have their own has image gallery true thing where you can just see images that people have sent on Discord. The problem here is that if it's just saving everyone's images, I went to the oldest images and let me tell you, I have to censor that. This is clearly lowly nasty. This is lowly. Yeah, I'm not sure what sort of answers you're getting from this in terms of tech support. I think they're just scraping everything.
And well, it turns out what happened is that aside from a few handpicked servers, all of the servers that are archived on Search Cord are from Discord's server discovery platform. So, when you go into Discord and you go to your little server discovery, every single one of these servers, if you sent a message in them, congratulations. It's now on the website. But don't you worry because if you did not consent, you can opt out. We do not archive anyone who does not want to be archived. I hope you guys see the the fallacy here. No one consented to their messages being put on some random website. When it comes to Discord users and privacy, they're like angsty teenagers. To them, this is like their parents taking the door off their bedroom. It's a war crime. But people really don't like their private Discord messages being posted publicly on a website, even though it's on a public Discord server. I'll get into that. Really, the thing here I want to point out is that if you don't want your information on this website, there is a button to opt out. But if you own a Discord server and you want to opt out a Discord server, you need to join their Discord server and create a ticket. So that's what I did. I joined their Discord server. And the first thing I saw was from the owner saying, "I think it's unfair that a Discord server owner gets to decide for all of their users if their content is visible or not." And this is coming from the one person who decides that your content is visible on their website. It It's just laughable.
Now, here's the thing. I'm going to flip the script for a second. You might not expect this from me. But so far, I've been pretty negative. I mean, 63 billion messages that you have saved that you're just putting on the internet, there's a good chance that like people's personal information is in there. So, when I ask the question, is this Search Cord thing a problem? Funny enough, my answer is no. But to explain why, there's two reasons why I don't think this is a problem. And then after that, I'm going to get into the real problem. So, the first reason why I don't think this is a problem is that discoverable Discord servers are like public. Anyone can search for these servers. And the most important part is that when I click to join this Marvel Rival server, I can see people's messages right now. But I'm actually not even in the server. I have not joined the server. I'm in this lurking mode. And what I want to point out is that these messages that you're seeing, they are something that anybody can see and save, which I'll explain later. And that's for any Discord server that is discoverable, which is exactly what Search Cord is going through. At the end of the day, these are public messages, and people fail to understand that. That's kind of my big PSA here, but please, for the love of God, stop using random Discord community servers like a group chat. There are so many people that have sent images or screenshots of their address, their name. They've given too much information where you can dox them off of that. I have seen people posting their school. Would you post your school on Twitter? No. So, what makes it different? You posting it to a Discord server. There's 130,000 people on this damn thing. This is still the internet. Stop oversharing stuff.
Now, let's get to my second reason why I don't think Search Cord is a big deal. And this is more of a devil's advocate take. Can you really say this website is bad or if this website is good? At the end of the day, it's a tool. Like, being able to search for answers is brilliant, like PDF MacBook, finding MacBook schematics. Or maybe you're someone that's a little bit more in the gray area. You want to catch a predator or something. And believe it or not, you can search for condo servers and they are all scraped. There will be vigilante groups that use this to stalk predators and get information on them to send to law enforcement. Again, this is assuming that the vigilantes are actually trying to do the right thing by working with law enforcement and not trying to do some street justice where they make a YouTube video bodyslamming someone in a Target. You know which video I'm talking about. I can't show you it though or else YouTube would get mad at me. But there are ways you can use this in a good way. But just like with any tool, you can misuse it. With Search Cord, some people might use this to harass people or stalk people across Discord. And just to give you a decent example, if you're someone with a unique username that's pretty short, like for example, people abbreviate my name to NTTS, right? For no other reason, you'd type in NTTS. And if you search for NTTS across Discord, for me, this is great. This can feed into my insecurities and see people talking about me and and me realizing I'm not as hot as I thought I was, which is fine cuz I'm kind of a loser anyways. But if you have a unique username like Fortnite Vietnam veteran with PTSD, all someone has to do, okay, obviously this works better with short names. If you had like something unique like Cal's J or something, if that was your username, someone stalking you could just search it up and see if it shows up. Might actually be someone's name. It's genuinely just like Google. With Google, you can search up Honda Civic Repair. But you can also use Google to dox people or to search up illegal websites or buy substances on the internet. What are we going to cancel Google now because it's just a search engine? Devil's advocate take.
But let's get to the real problem. The owner of SearchCord said, "There is a 0% chance I am the only one scraping that server." And since we're talking about these websites, I finally get to talk about something that I I have been like documenting for months. I think I have been sent either three, four, or five different websites like Search Cord just in the past month. And three of those websites were focused and advertised in cybercrime groups. We're talking about people that extort minors to go on webcam to do awful things. These websites, people might think, "Oh, it's just like Search Cord. It only looks through discoverable Discord servers to find victims." No, these websites specifically target smaller Discord servers that aren't on Discord's discovery. For example, they look at mental health Discord servers because if someone's in a mental health crisis, they're perfect to manipulate. It sounds bad and it you might think I'm giving people ideas, but no, this has genuinely happened. This has happened before. It's in court documents. This is what happens behind the scenes. There will always be websites that will save your Discord messages and can and will be used against you in a court of Discord law. Usually in malicious purposes to either extort you, dox you. It's a cesspool. And to make things even worse, I saw today that the owner of Search Cord has had at least four different people contact them and show them their scraped data sets with billions of messages. Always assume that your Discord messages sent anywhere outside of a DM, a group DM, or a small Discord server with your friends. Any messages sent outside of those, just assume that they're going to be saved and put on the internet. And if there's ever another spy.pet that surfaces that causes a huge outrage, you don't have to worry about it.
But wait, I'm not finished yet. Because right now, everyone's upset with Search Cord. But in the same sweep of news, the the same time frame of news, 404 Media released an article saying that researchers scraped two billion Discord messages and then published them online. It's not cyber criminals or sketchy people on Discord that are saving your messages. It's like researchers, too. And they just uploaded it for anyone to download. Now, to be fair, it's like anonymized. But the reason why I'm including this in the video is the fact that it shows you how flawed Discord is. You see, people are mad at these Discord scrapers, but they fail to realize that Discord actively lets this happen. And now this is more of my opinion, but the Search Cord owner Reiko never had to solve a single capture to scrape any of this data, which means that any Joe Schmo, even myself, with the help of ChatGPT and maybe a whole bunch of caffeine. That's a good that'd be a great gamer subs plug right there. Use code NTTS, by the way, to get your anime caffeine drink. I really did that. But you don't need to deal with captions, so literally any [ __ ] including myself, could just make a bot that could scrape through people's messages. And what can you do about it? Absolutely nothing. If you go into your Discord settings and you go to data and privacy, there is no way to mass delete all your messages. Even though, to be fair, most of your Discord messages are already probably saved by one of those sketchy websites I talked about before. By the way, when you delete your Discord account, it only anonymizes your message. It says deleted user. Again, if you're a stupid child and you sent your address or what school you go to, well, now it's just sent by a deleted user, which isn't like a cut and dry solution, right? In fact, things got so bad that I made a video where you had to use a loophole to get your messages deleted. And the reason why Discord doesn't want to delete your messages, according to Discord, is the fact that if a given text channel were suddenly missing important context, it would be confusing to other users or possibly mislead those users about what happened in that conversation. Discord, you want to know what's confusing to me? It's the fact that this problem will repeatedly come up. It consistently happens. We have spy.pet. There's disc.tool, which is the same thing long ago. We have Search Cord. People aren't happy about their privacy being invaded, and there's still those four to five other sketchy websites that I haven't named. There are always going to be people that will save your messages, and Discord gives you no tools to delete all your messages to undo any up you might have done. Just remember that at the end of the day, Discord is still the internet. Always assume that your messages will be saved and published somewhere on the internet.
Anyways, gamers, if someone finds a message from me talking about how I'm cheating on my wife, please do me a favor and send it to me so I can delete it. Just kidding. I don't have a wife. She's part of one of my delusions. Bye-bye. Love you.