No, they're not. Holding a static, private archive is not the same thing as hosting a live, public site.

How so? Aren't people freely perusing all this data, extracting GPS metadata and reading both public and private conversations?

You cannot be more wrong with this claim, you might not had to deal with this privately or professionaly I presume in which case it is understandable. Parler is liable for taking absolutely no precaution with their users data with whom they had a terms & conditions agreement (in short: users agreed to upload their data for a specific purpose)

Now, ripping that _user_ generated data from the website this way without justified (justified = platform user agreement + legitimate interest) purpose or intent or even agreement and storing / distributing / processing it is the epitome of a GDPR transgression and borderline criminal at least in the EU (saying this as a EU citizen). They are liable. I wouldn't touch that dataset with a 10 foot pole. And I would even less brag about it on Twitter, things we do for clout I guess... :)

I have no stake in this thing, it's just to emphasize that statements like this are what get people and businesses in big trouble. Stay safe! Archive only your own data or data you gathered legitimately. Take the rest up with a lawyer or ... read the laws.

The claim I'm making is "they are not, in fact, 'just another Parler.'" You are pointing out many correct things about their potential liability and problems with holding that data! However, those things are, at most, a subset of the problems with Parler and at worst disjoint problems from Parler's problems. I stand by the argument of "a static, private data archive is not the same as a live, public web service." I did not make the argument of "there are no problems with the static, private data archive."