A surprising privacy issue has surfaced in ARC Raiders after players discovered the game was logging private Discord direct messages under certain conditions. The good news is that the problem has already been fixed, with Embark Studios pushing a hotfix soon after the discovery became public.
The issue was first brought to light by computer engineer Timothy D. Meadows, who detailed his findings after investigating ARC Raiders’ Discord integration. According to his report, when a player enabled Discord integration by linking their Discord account, the game could record private one-on-one Discord conversations and write them into a plain text log file stored locally on the player’s computer.
What made the situation even more concerning was the level of detail included in that log. The file reportedly contained the full contents of private messages shared between Discord users. Meadows also found that a Discord bearer authentication token was being saved in the same log. In practical terms, that could have increased the risk of exposure if someone else had access to the PC, if crash logs were shared, or if certain local apps and tools scanned or collected those files.
Importantly, the problem wasn’t affecting everyone. It was tied to the Discord SDK behavior and only impacted players who had connected their Discord accounts to ARC Raiders. Anyone who never linked Discord reportedly wasn’t exposed to this logging issue.
After the report spread, Embark Studios responded and acknowledged that the Discord SDK had logged more information than intended. The studio also stated that the data stayed on the user’s own machine, was not transmitted elsewhere, and was not accessed or stored by the development team. To address the problem, Embark released a hotfix that disables the unwanted logging behavior, and the team says it is conducting a deeper audit to help prevent similar privacy issues in the future.
For players, the main takeaway is clear: if you had ARC Raiders connected to Discord, the game may have created local logs containing private message content before the hotfix. With the fix now deployed, Embark says the specific logging behavior has been stopped, and additional checks are underway to ensure Discord integration and other connected features behave as intended going forward.
