Users, who flocked to the site on the promise of free speech and expression without censorship, were dealt a parting blow from a researcher who said she is in the process of archiving nearly all public posts on Parler and will make them available to others online. That scraping, as it’s known, wouldn’t have been so easy for a bigger site with more security precautions in place, security experts said.

One of Parler’s selling points, extolled publicly by executives, was privacy — compared with the reams of data Twitter and Facebook collect on users.

“It’s one thing to have the intention of privacy, and it’s another to be able to deliver it in a meaningful way,” security researcher Troy Hunt said Monday. Hunt, who was not involved in the data leak, pointed out that although the data may have been legally obtained, Facebook and Twitter have controls in place to prevent such scraping.