ARC Raiders recorded private Discord DM messages between players in "serious privacy and security violations" — Embark promises that your data is safe

Well, this isn't what I was expecting to write about today: recently, an issue with 2025's juggernaut extraction shooter ARC Raiders was discovered that led to the game silently recording private DM messages between Discord users.

The issue in question first came to light when computer engineer Timothy D. Meadows reported its existence in a blog post, explaining how ARC Raiders logged player DMs in detail. "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," he wrote.

"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," he added. He then went on to note that these DM logs could theoretically be included in crash or bug report uploads, accessible by other local applications, or visible to third parties with "access to the machine."

Meadows' investigation highlights the fact that this is an issue with the ARC Raiders Discord software development kit (SDK) specifically, and has only affected people who chose to link their Discord with the extraction shooter. Note that you can unlink it in your Discord's settings.

The discovery of this bizarre — and concerning, for obvious reasons — message recording prompted developer Embark Studios to quickly announce an inbound hotfix for the issue on Thursday morning, noting that the Discord SDK logged "excessive user information." It's also assured players that their data was never sent off their local system, and that "a deeper audit" is underway.

"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," the developers wrote on the ARC Raiders Discord. "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."

While it's good news that Embark is quickly fixing this problem, it's quite shocking that such a major breach of privacy even occurred in the first place. Worse yet, users didn't even know their messages were being scraped until now, as the issue was only just recently discovered.

If you have your ARC Raiders account linked to your Discord or had it linked previously, I strongly recommend checking your system for a log of your DMs and deleting it. Meadows says it will be found in the C:\Users\AppData\Local\PioneerGame\Saved\Logs folder, so be sure to have a look there.

It's worth noting that Discord itself is going through some controversies regarding user privacy and data right now, with the app recently announcing plans to assume everyone is a teen by default and require age verification for access to all features. Backlash to this policy — and plans for facial age estimation and government ID verification in particular — was so strong that Discord has delayed it until later this year, and completely reworked its approach.

Seriously, check for that log file!

Now, I'm not saying that there was any malicious intent here, or that Embark Studios was intentionally scraping your Discord DMs. But even so, you should look for and delete that log file ASAP if you have your accounts for ARC Raiders and Discord linked. I'm curious to hear from you, though: has this made you rethink linking your Discord with the games you play? Let me know in the comments.

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