Thread by @spdustin

Parler getting kicked off AWS is really wild. Don’t get me wrong, AWS has the absolute right to do it, but the fact that they ARE doing it is mostly unheard of.

For sure, the act *itself* makes Parler toxic to every other cloud computing provider with infrastructure in the U.S.

Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure certainly won’t touch them with a ten foot pole. And as much as Parler admins claim they developed the site to avoid vendor lock-in, that’s probably the most expensive way to host on AWS, and is almost certainly not true in real life.

And they have, what, a day to move the site? There’s probably enough data alone to make that impossible, even with Mercer Money. Unless they’ve been backing up offsite to external media (highly doubtful), they likely won’t be able to get all their data out in time.

Given the political connections to Parler (the Mercers), it’s likely that *some* data has been offloaded for data mining & machine learning purposes. The onboarding value (using the martech definition) is high, so that’s almost a given.

(The short martech definition of onboarding: the act of enriching a little bit of personal data from one source with a shit ton more personal data from multiple other sources. Like when Facebook merges your personal profile with data from credit card processors and ad networks.)

Which, yes, they (Facebook) absolutely do. Among a myriad of other sources of personal data, including data purchased from data brokers. Companies that know what stores you visit because you left WiFi and Bluetooth on when you walked in the door. But that’s a different topic.

Anyway, the bottom line: odds are, Parler is deeply fucked. And, as an aside, with the Mercer family involved, it’s almost certainly a honeypot for conservative data because that’s all that family is interested in.

Alright, I’m done nerding out for now.