Oh dear - ARC Raiders was logging your private Discord chats

Here's a reminder that when you connect up various accounts - you may end up just increasing the risk of your private data going somewhere else. The issue concerns account connections between the chat app Discord and the extraction shooter ARC Raiders, with far more information being available and logged than it should have.

The issue was exposed by Timothy Meadows in a blog post, which has seen a correction on one part since originally posting, but still shows there was a clear issue. As summed up by Meadows:

During gameplay of Arc Raiders, private Discord Direct Message (DM) conversations between two users were found being written in plaintext to a local game log file. Additionally, a full Discord Bearer authentication token was found stored in the same log file. These findings represent serious privacy and security violations that affect all players using Discord integration with the game.

The ARC Raiders team posted an announcement in their own Discord about a recent game server issue, but also directly mentioned this too:

The team is also working on a hotfix to address an issue where the Discord SDK logged excessive user information. Rest assured that your private and/or personal data was not sent outside your machine and Embark has not (and will not) review or keep such information. We will disable the Discord SDK logging and are conducting a deeper audit to ensure no further issues. If you have questions or concerns, please contact our support team.

That hotfix is now live as of article publishing time.

This was quite likely not in any way intentional or malicious, but goes to show how easily a game could grab your information from Discord if you link accounts. While in this case Embark Studios claim nothing was sent outside of your machine - it's a big reminder of security and privacy issues that can arise. And, how Discord can give out a lot of information that you may think is private to potentially any service you link up with.