> When users deleted their posts, the site failed to remove the content and instead only added a delete flag to it.
Like if this wasn't what ever single social media does...
@arjen Years ago I accidentally recovered tons of deleted emails from my microsoft account just configuring an IMAP client...
...
@ekaitz_zarraga I think you're right, and on purpose only stated "was easy to crawl", no further judgement :-)
Things wouldn't be that different if someone set out to do this on Mastodon either, although it would probably take much longer to collect a large sample.
@arjen @ekaitz_zarraga mastodon used to have sequential numeric IDs, but that changed some years back to prevent this exact type of data leaks. now they are randomized
One more for this little thread:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vqew/the-hacker-who-archived-parler-explains-how-she-did-it-and-what-comes-next
https://idf.social/@arjen/105545208394711491