Discord's Largest Bots Are Tracking You

ORIGINAL LINK - https://doxbin.org/upload/DiscordsLargestBotsAreTrackingYou

Discord's Largest Bots Are Tracking You

BlueStacks - The desktop android emulator company - seems to have acquired a handful of Discord's largest bots, this includes:
- Ayana (https://ayana.io)
- YAGPDB.xyz (https://yagpdb.xyz)
- Carl Bot (https://carl.gg)
- FredBoat (https://fredboat.com)
- weeb.sh (popular image service used by plenty other bots)

These bots see over 4 million Discord servers and over a hundred million users (scary!)

-- ADVERTISING --

Ayana Bot and YAGPDB.xyz have already started advertising BlueStacks software within their bots.

For Ayana, this is through audio ads when you listen to music through it. See the reviews on Bots On Discord's site - https://bots.ondiscord.xyz/bots/185476724627210241

> They just added ads that not only send them in the text chat while playing music
> They recently added ads, which you can't skip or kick the bot or anything.

For YAGPDB.xyz, there is a square advert in the corner of their web dashboard - Linking to "https://bstk.me/pAZHCOiVW" aka BlueStacks

-- USER TRACKING --

It has recently come to our attention that BlueStacks is creating a service for advertising your Discord server through these bots. This service is discordadvertiser.com - We know this is operated by BlueStacks as their site was also available in a subdomain on their main site, bluestacks.com.

Main site: https://web.archive.org/web/20200614001114/https://discordadvertiser.com/building-community.html
Bluestacks.com subdomain: https://web.archive.org/web/20200614000849/http://wp-d.bluestacks.com/building-community.html

The "Building Community" page states the following:
> We process billions of messages, millions of game status updates

Discord Bots receive Presence Updates (when you open a game) or Message Events (ANY message you send - not just when it starts with their command prefix!). It appears that BlueStacks is using this to track all HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of their users of their bots for future advertising - based on the games they play and what they say.

This is a severe violation of Discord's Developer Terms of Service:
https://discord.com/developers/docs/legal
> You shall not sell, license or otherwise commercialize any End User Data.

-- TLDR IT FOR ME --

Discord's largest bots (see the list above) are tracking what you do for future advertising.

Q: What can I do?
A: Remove the bots from servers you own and hope that Discord acts on it.

Q: Should I use discordadvertiser.com?
A: If you support users being unknowingly tracked against their will, sure.

Q: Can I trust other bots?
A: Hopefully, yes. BlueStacks seems to be the only company that is using bots they own for malicious (against Discord ToS) purposes.

Q: Do BlueStacks have a Monopoly over Discord Bots?
A: Not really. Although they own these bots, there are hundreds of other discord bots in thousands of servers that you might be able to trust more.

Q: Where can I find other Discord Bots?
A: Bot lists such as top.gg.

Regards
~~XoX3~~