In this post last week I discussed a meeting between myself and a client who asked why they would pay SMEE to collect social media data instead of getting their secretary to take screenshots of their web browser. That earlier post dealt with the ability to defend the evidence in the witness box. Today I want to examine another aspect of the difference between web browser screenshots, and an SMEE data collection.
As you well know, all social media sites and most websites these days, and all powered behind-the-scenes by a very large database. All the content; be that text, photos, audio, video, it all gets stored in a big database. When you store a piece of data in a database, you don’t just store that data itself. There are lots of other bits of data that get stored with that data. This is called “meta-data”. You can store all different types of meta-data, but some of the common types are:
- The time and date that you first stored the data in the database
- A unique ID number for that piece of data, in case you get lots of similar but different pieces of data in your database that you want to be able to tell apart.
- The relationship that piece of data has to other pieces of data in your database. For example, “tagging” someone in a photo creates a relationship between one piece of data (the photo) and another piece of data (the person’s profile).
- The geographic coordinates of the device that stored the data in the database. For example, the GPS coordinates of where you uploaded a photo from.
In many instances, the meta-data attached to a piece of data is more informative than the data itself. A photo of a sunset isn’t particularly incriminating. The GPS meta-data that shows that the person who uploaded the photo was in a completely different location than where they claim they were could be incriminating.
This is a key difference between taking screenshots in a web browser, and an SMEE data collection. The screenshot does not, and can not, give you the meta-data attached to any evidence you may find. Only by interrogating the database itself can you collect, preserve and exhibit the metadata associated with social media evidence. This is what we do. We do it quickly, we do it comprehensively, and we do it without sitting there for endless hours.
Which brings up another key point – the volume of material. I’ll examine that aspect in another post.
