Researcher Builds Parler Archive Amid Amazon Suspension

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A security researcher said she has scraped and is archiving 99 percent of Parler’s public posts, as the social-media network goes offline following suspensions from Amazon, Apple and Google.
 
Archived content includes public posts from the social-media site. These posts reportedly included Parler video URLs made up of raw video files with associated embedded metadata – and precise GPS coordinates of where the videos were taken, sparking privacy concerns about the service’s data collection.
 
The researcher behind the archival effort, who goes by @donk_enby on Twitter, told Threatpost that no private information was disclosed as part of the effort – all archived posts were already publicly available via the web.
 
Parler, which launched in 2018 and markets itself as a “free speech social network,” has a significant user base of supporters of Donald Trump, conservatives and right-wing extremists. As of November, the site had 10 million total users.
 
The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol building led to several U.S. tech giants cracking down on the service, including Apple and Google banning the app from their respective app marketplaces. That’s because several organizations, including the Atlantic Council, have called out Parler for not moderating its “town square,” allowing users to publicizing the protest for weeks.
 
Meanwhile, Amazon reportedly informed Parler it was removing it from its web hosting service on Sunday night, essentially stripping it of the infrastructure it relies on to operate. Parler for its part on Monday filed a complaint against Amazon, alleging that it was kicked off for political and anti-competitive reasons.
 
On the heels of the Capitol riot, @donk_enby on Jan. 6 began to archive the posts. With Sunday’s news of Amazon stripping Parler from its web hosting service, she ramped up her efforts, saying on Twitter she was crawling 1.1 million Parler video URLs and calling for others to join in on the effort.
 
Contrary to various reports circulating on Reddit and other internet forums, there is no evidence that Parler was actually hacked; according to reports, @donk_enby was able to reverse-engineer the Parler iOS app, in order to discover a web address that the application uses internally to retrieve data.

Read more: https://threatpost.com/parler-archive-am...on/162928/