> Every record has gam_audiences and audiences_member_of populated, Google Ad Manager audience segments, with values like coach-nudge experiment groups, trial eligibility, lapsed-user cohorts and rating-band targeting.

It sure seems like the evidence doesn't point to scraping to me.

Lichess.org is an internet gem. No ads, no subs, incredible performance, low-toxicity, fully featured, free API, European.

Far superior to chess.com in all regards. If you're still on chess.com, make this your opportunity to switch. You won't regret it.

> The data had been pulled by abusing the platform’s find-friends feature

Sounds like the find-friends feature shouldn't allow access to the majority of that data unless the "friend" accepts, don't think the "scraper" got 7mil accepts just because they had access to emails... To me this is 100% a breach, even more so because its already happened once years ago to 700k, and they changed nothing to prevent it.

I just logged in to delete my chess.com account, got a message: "This account is closed, please log in with your e-Mail to reactivate". No word by them having been hacked.

Worth noting this was reported back in August, it’s not new

uh oh. If my ELO gets back to my friends I'm going to be very embarrassed.

I closed my account before they find out and trace my moves.

Closing the account doesn't delete the scraped copy. Your moves are already sitting in somebody's S3 bucket, and nobody's getting paged about that one.

I just got a message from an Hacker: "You seriously just played London opening as white and King Indian defense as black for the last 3 months?"

Btw I hate that chess.com puts game reviews under their most expensive plan, I ain't paying so much for something I can get in lichess for free.

Stockfish is open source, so chess.com is mostly charging for server compute and polish. Lichess just runs the engine in your browser, which is how it stays free.

Exactly, chess.com is at value extraction phase. Lichess is much better platform now.

Switched a year ago. Lichess analysis runs Stockfish in your browser, and the opening explorer is free. Only gotcha: server analysis queues get slow during big tournaments.

What's the forum shown in the screenshot?

Hack or scraping, both are equally bad.

Basically our data is free.

Peasants have no rights and shall be slaves.

I disagree. If it was scraped, that's public profile data anyone could already view. Not the same as a breach where private stuff like passwords gets taken.

email? Is a user's email up for grabs just like that?

email gets you username via find-friends, not the reverse. The emails were obtained independently of chess.com

After reading this, the only respectable thing to do was to close my account, and I did close it. Email addresses were not supposed to be leaked but they were, which hints at atrocious security.

Is scraping wrong that, is the question.

Nobody told the find-friends endpoint that most chess players don't have any friends.