Watch out, Parler users: nearly all posts on the shuttered social network, including deleted posts, have been archived and are now in the public domain

This is the result of a group effort in which dozens of people downloaded a large number of Parler posts before the service was taken offline this past weekend, as Parler pulled the plug Sunday (January 10) on the server Amazon had leased from Parler, The service was shut down; Parler is suing Amazon to resume service

Parler is a fairly new social network that promised not to police users who advocate violence or engage in hate speech It was popular among members of far-right groups and supporters of President Donald Trump in general

It is estimated that many of the thousands of pro-Trump rioters who stormed the US Capitol last week used the parlor

But don't call this data dump a leak or even a hack One of the leaders of the download project revealed on Twitter that all of the rapidly collected, or "scraped," Parler data was already online

"Only what was publicly available through the web was archived," said Crash Override, aka @donk_enby 'We don't have your email address, your phone number, or your credit card number Unless you post it yourself on Parler"

Crash Override (whose handle is a reference to the 1995 film "Hackers") said the Reddit post, which received many views on Sunday and Monday, was incorrect The post, which has since been updated, states that Parler's database was hacked and Parler users' personal information was downloaded

Parler apparently "authenticated" users who requested that designation by having them send images of their driver's license and, in some cases, social security numbers Parler required all users to provide a valid e-mail address and phone number during the sign-up process

Crash Override, however, said she had no such personal information and that the truth was far less dramatic

She told Gizmodo that she had already reverse-engineered Parler's mobile app and found a URL pointing to a publicly available archive of all Parler's posts, including those marked for deletion

On January 6, the day of the Capitol Hill riots, she began mass downloading Parler's posts from that archive

After Google and Facebook removed Parlor from their app stores on Friday and Saturday (January 8 and 9), Crash Override realized Parlor might not be available much longer She called for help downloading parlor posts on Twitter and began a mass download

Eventually, she said, about 70 TB of Parler posts were archived, which Crash Override estimated to be over 99% of the Parler archive

Many of the posts contained photos and videos with metadata attached indicating when and where they were taken

[On January 12, Gizmodo published a follow-up report that GPS metadata from videos posted on Parler matched the movement of rioters in Washington on January 6]

The data was transferred to the Internet Archive, an online repository of old websites and public domain material It is not yet available to the public, but may be by the end of this week

However, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies may not need the data that Crash Override and her team scraped

Since the parlor may have been used to organize the Capitol Hill riots, it is safe to assume that Amazon is storing the data housed on the servers leased by the parlor If Parler did indeed retain images of authenticated users' driver's licenses, they would be there, along with all the copies grabbed by Crash Override and her colleagues