Embark Studios has rushed out a hotfix after it was reported that Arc Raiders had been quietly recording players' private Discord DMs.
Engineer Timothy D. Meadows reports on what he calls "serious privacy and security violations" connected to last year's juggernaut shooter, explaining that messages sent between two players were being captured by the Arc Raider's Discord SDK and "written in full to a plaintext log file stored locally on the user's machine," unbeknownst to the players themselves. This was notably not a default, but rather the effects of linking your Discord account to Arc Raiders (you can unlink it in the settings menu).
"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," Meadows writes, before warning that "third parties with access to the machine or crash reports can read private conversations."
Embark Studios quickly addressed the digital elephant in the room in an update also posted to Discord, writing that its Discord SDK "logged excessive user information" without exactly spelling out how. The team has now rolled out a hotfix.
"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," the developer continues. "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."
The Discord agreement that pops up when you link your account to Arc Raiders doesn't mention that Embark would or could log such information, naturally. But after today's hotfix, according to our testing, such Discord logs are no longer generated.
This comes as Discord fights its own privacy and security battle in an attempt to woo players on upcoming age verification which will age-lock accounts by default.
