Arc Raiders developers confirm it has been secretly recording private Discord messages

Direct messaging inherently comes with some degree of privacy for the user sending the message and the user receiving the message, but given today's climate of troves of data being stored in various scenarios where you wouldn't expect that to happen, it's becoming more commonplace to find out private messages aren't actually so private.

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The latest to join that list is Arc Raiders and Discord, as computer engineer Timothy Meadows discovered that when a player linked their Discord to Arc Raiders, their private messages were being stored on their PC, and they could have been accessed with Discord tokens. This means that Arc Raiders developers, Embark Studios, could have accessed the private messages of players if they so chose.

The problem was quickly identified by Embark Studios, which released a hotfix and explained that "debugging features intended for developers building and testing Social SDK game integrations" resulted in "some players' Discord information from the game being stored locally on their device, and viewing it would require access to the device or the files themselves. Embark has released a hotfix for the issue, and we are providing guidance to developers and updating the Discord Social SDK with additional protections."

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Arc Raiders players were assured that their messages and personal data weren't sent outside their machines, and Embark has committed to an internal audit to identify any additional similar holes in its security. Judging by how Embark conducted itself during the security concern, such as its prompt response and admittance, it suggests that this security breach wasn't intentional by the developer.