F.D.S. Labs Announces New Services for Retrieval of Public Social Media Data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Every minute, it is estimated that approximately 31 million posts are made on Facebook, 347 thousand Tweets are posted on Twitter and 48 thousand photos or videos are posted on Instagram. Some of this data is accessible to anyone, even without any ties to the individuals posting it. The challenge, up until recently, has been gathering and preserving the data for use in a legal setting. Typically, attorneys, investigators or law enforcement used time consuming subpoenas, court orders or warrants to obtain the information directly from the service providers. Other methods included manually documenting or “screen capturing” the material. While effective, these methods of manual documentation lack automated authentication steps that preserve the chain of custody and prove the authenticity of the data collected.

FDS Labs now has the capability of recovering public social media data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Messages, posts, locations, photos, profiles and contact information shared publicly using these services can be quickly gathered, analyzed and presented in an easy to view timeline type report. All that is needed for us to extract the public data is the user id of the poster and date ranges of the posts. No more wading through page after page of online posts to try to manually screen capture the data before it is removed.

Our method of extraction complies with the requirements of self-authenticating digital identification outlined in the new Federal Rule of Evidence 902(14) put into place on December 1, 2017.

 

Contact Hank Waring or Dwayne White at 661-267-1155 to discuss your case. Or email us at info@fdslabs.com