ARC Raiders was quietly recording players' private Discord DMs until Embark released a hotfix

A strange privacy issue was recently discovered in ARC Raiders, where the game was found logging private Discord conversations. The issue has now been addressed, as developer Embark Studios quickly released a hotfix to stop the problem after it came to light.

The issue was first reported by computer engineer Timothy D. Meadows, who shared details about the problem in a blog post. According to his investigation, the game was recording private direct messages between Discord users when the Discord integration was enabled. These conversations were being written to a plain text log file stored locally on the player’s computer.

The log file reportedly contained the full content of private messages exchanged between users. On top of that, Meadows also discovered that a Discord bearer authentication token was being saved in the same file. In theory, this meant that anyone with access to the computer, crash reports, or certain local applications could potentially view those messages.

The problem was linked specifically to the Discord SDK used in the game, and it only affected players who had connected their Discord accounts with ARC Raiders. Players who never linked their Discord accounts were not affected. 

Shortly after the issue became public, Embark Studios responded and confirmed that the Discord SDK had logged more user information than intended. The studio assured players that the data was never transmitted outside the user’s computer and that the developers never accessed or stored the messages themselves. A hotfix has also been released that disables the problematic logging behavior. The team further stated that it is performing a deeper audit to make sure similar issues do not appear in the future.