Enjoy!

[james_davis_nicoll]

Oh my God

Parler required users to give their social security numbers

And now they've been hacked

This is the biggest fucking grift I've ever seen, I knew these people were stupid, but my God they gave their SSN because Twitter mods were "meanies" to them

— Contented Independent (@ContentedIndie) November 24, 2020

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Wow.

[ba_munronoe]

They're now claiming that it didn't happen: https://streetloc.com/news/view/J2b/parler-was-not-hacked-a-wordpress-config-file-that-was-leaked-online

[conuly]

Isn't the far right super obsessed with privacy?

[dewline]

Tired and not laughing.

[brooksmoses]

And ContentedIndie has posted a "maybe my sources were wrong" sort of tweet:

This will be my semi-final tweet in this thread, as this has gotten way too big for me to deal with:

1. Parler was breached in July
2. There are reports of it being hacked again tonight
3. In contradiction of my previous tweet, the site was not based off WordPress it seems
https://twitter.com/ContentedIndie/status/1331385524314124288

Final final tweet:

There is a lot of conflicting information going around about the hacks and the timeframes of the hacks so I'm not going to be speaking anymore about this in case there was no recent hack

The SSN thing though is fucking egregious
https://twitter.com/ContentedIndie/status/1331392654899339266

[brooksmoses]

...No?

My impression of typical far-right ideology is that the only reason its proponents care about privacy is insofar as it supports their actual value of not having anyone, and particularly not the government, interfere with their ability to do whatever they want.

There's also the atypical subgroup that fancies themselves to be an underground resistance organization and care about privacy for that reason, but they seem to be rather atypical and also seem to be the sort of people who use Bitcoin "because it's untraceable".

[keith_morrison]

Only as it pertains to government. It's similar to the way they are incandescently outraged at the idea a government bureaucrat could make a decision that might affect them, but replace "government bureaucrat" with "middle manager at Apex Super Colossal MegaCorp Inc", well, that's just free enterprise and the market at work.

[bibliofile]

This.

[beatrice_otter]

The far right regularly cheers on government surveillance such as the PATRIOT act and claims that anyone who doesn't like the NSA being able to get all your electronic data and metadata without a warrant is obviously a criminal or otherwise has something to hide.

[dormouse1953]

I take it that Parler is something you have to be in the US to join? (I have neither an SSN nor a driving licence.)

[ffutures]

OK, that's just stupid. Going by the Wikipedia description, how the hell would anyone think that signing up to that was a good idea? Hey, we need you to prove that you're a real person so let's have scans of a crucial document that makes ID theft trivially easy...

[ariaflame]

You can join without that stuff I believe (it apparently has quite a few people from Saudi Arabia) it just gives extra access/perks to those that did the SSN thing.

[thewayne]

Every doctor I go to has a block for your SSN on their paperwork, and I always leave it blank.

Maroons.

There's no possible reason Parler would require SSN. What, they're going to run background checks on all their users? I kinda doubt that. If you're not my employer, or someone that I want to borrow money from, or the government, you don't get my SSN.

[thewayne]

Because it would be so hard to look up what is a valid three digit SSN prefix and throw some ten-sided dice to generate the rest of the numbers.

A friend of mine sort of had his SSN appropriated. Someone used it to get a job, and regularly made deposits to his social security retirement account. He didn't mind that too much.

[thewayne]

Ah, yes. The old "If you've got nothing to hide...." reasoning.

Sorry, blanket collection is useless. A study of the programs that Edward Snowden spilled the beans on showed that ONE prosecutable case came out of all that data swooped up, and IIRC it was a small money transfer case that had already been found and prosecuted long after it was sifted out of the NSA data.

[lampwick]

Undocumented workers frequently use fake SSNs. Which turns out to be yet another benefit immigrants bring to the US -- that money can't be paid to a fake account and just gets added to the Social Security fund.

[al_zorra]

well Parler is run / own / invested in

-- or or all of the above --

by the same shoggoths of Cambridge Analytica. Of course they're going to demand every bit of personal information from the fools that follow them as possible.

Perhaps these grift machines will collapse from their own weight of unbearable grift.

[bolindbergh]

The Unbearable Griftness of Being is a book that needs to exist.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't use the site, but my understanding is that SS# (and photo ID) are required for members that are sufficiently popular, like the equivalent of the "blue check" on Twitter. Those members receive financial remuneration from Parler based on how many people click on their posts, so the SS# and ID are required because Parler has to report the money they give those users to the IRS as income.

I am confident YouTube also has the SS#'s of the people that are getting a cut of the ad money from that site.

So basically Parler is a site designed for people that decided that the cesspool that is Twitter is insufficiently deep and/or shit-filled, but this particular outrage is not properly worthy of outrage.

--
Nathan H.