Anyway, for those wondering why Parler would have so much personal info on its users, it's because they had this strange obsession with keeping dupes, fakes, and bots off of the platform.

So they apparently required all kinds of intrusive "verification" info, which has now come back to bite them. I never tried to sign up, so I never got to see specifically what they asked for. The whole "we need to totally verify you're a real person before you are validated here" tends to be code for "we want to harvest your info and data", and that's always a big no from me.

That's not the only reason I stayed away from Parler. As I said, it looked like a weak Twitter knockoff and an echo chamber. While the left tends to be more obsessed with isolating themselves from the "evils" of the other side, some of the right are also guilty of this, and I want no part of it.