Quick Tips For Preserving Social Media

June 6, 2011

There is no arguing that social media sites are a boon for information related to a case, and not just for Family law, but also for corporate litigation as well.  We have had tremendous success with using social sites to tie component pieces of  a hard drive or cell phone investigation together.

The proliferation of social websites like Facebook can create discovery issues, though: How do you properly preserve a social site?  How do you deal with the opposing side arguing that the request to preserve is “overly burdensome”?

In this article I will walk you through three of the most popular social media sites and some techniques to preserve them easily.

1: Facebook (www.FaceBook.com):  Facebook is probably the easiest site to preserve.  The user can simply go to “Account Settings”, scroll down to “Download Your Information”, and click on “learn more”.  From the Facebook description:

“This tool lets you download a copy of your information, including your photos and videos, posts on your Wall, all of your messages, your friend list and other content you have shared on your profile. Within this zip file you will have access to your data in a simple, browseable manner.”

Once the user clicks “Download”, FaceBook will aggregate the information and email a link to the download.  Depending on how much information is there, this can take several minutes or even hours.

2: LinkedIn (www.LinkedIN.com):  LinkedIN is a site geared more towards a professional profile than Facebook.  We have been successful in using it to uncover additional email addresses, business documents, associations and affiliations primarily in Corporate cases, but it has factored into family law cases before.

The good news is that, while the Facebook preservation method is only useful if you are the specific user, LinkedIN can be documented for the profile information of other users.  The bad news is that it is slightly more complex than Facebook to preserve (but not much more!).

The easiest way to archive a LinkedIN account is to already have one yourself, or to create one.  NOTE: If the person you are archiving has LinkedIN’s upgraded service, or has agreed to let others see when they view a profile, they will be able to see that you viewed their profile.  I’m not going to encourage you to break the Terms of Service by creating an archive account, but that is one way to get around this.

Next, you will want to navigate to Profile-> Profile Organizer.  This is actually a paid service offered by LinkedIN, but usually it has a free 30-day trial.  More importantly, the free trial does not require a credit card.

Once you sign up for the Profile Organizer, you will be able to search for specific individuals, companies, etc.  When you find a profile you can save it to your organizer, archive it, and print it to a PDF.

3: Twitter (www.Twitter.com): Unlike the others, Twitter doesn’t have an actual built-in archiving functionality.  Twitter DOES have a great advanced search function that you can access at: search.twitter.com

Once on the Twitter search site, look for the “Advanced Search” link.  This will allow you to drill into searches by user, dates, topics, specific words or phrases, locations, etc.
Once you have search results, you can print to PDF, save the list, or use the nifty RSS link in the upper right called “Feed for this query”.

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New Tricks: Data Mining With Google Spreadsheets

March 22, 2010

Happily, I stumbled across the following link:

Now You Can Mine Data With Google Queries Too

The interesting bit is below the comic where they actually reveal a method I hadn’t thought of: 

Using a query embedded in Google Spreadsheets to mine and graph data in Google’s engine.

While the actual instructions are terse, I was able to get things up and running by visiting the actual example, and then copying and pasting the individual cells for examination.

Here is the blow by blow:

First, decide what you want to mine.  One of the examples is for income, we will use this one.

Open up Google spreadsheets and in cell A2 put (complete as printed here):

=””””&”I make $”&B2&” per year”””

[NOTE:  WordPress jacks up the quotes, so you are going to have to replace all of the quotes in the above with double quotes, or it won’t work!]

Initially it is gonna look like this “I make $ per year”.

Now in B2 put a dollar amount: 45,000.

You should see your number populate in B1 now.

Finally, the magic that actually gets the query info.

Put the following in C2:

=importXML(“http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=”&A2,&#8221://p%5B@id=’resultStats’%5D/b%5B3%5D”)

[NOTE: Same problem here – WordPress tries to mess with the multiple quotes.  Replace all double AND single quotes manually and you will be fine, otherwise you will get an Error.]

After a brief load time you should see a number returned.  This is the number of returns that included your statement in cell A2.

Now copy and paste A2 and C2 down the line and change your values accordingly as you move down.

To create the graph, simply open “Insert->Chart” and choose your graph type.

To populate the graph with your data, make sure to clear the box right under “What Data?” and then click and drag down column C on your spreadsheet.  Make sure to remove Column C as labels.  You should see your data represented in the preview.

That’s it!  The world is now your oyster!  I can’t wait to apply this in some cases I am working on, I am still mulling over where this can be most useful, but the possibilities boggle the mind.

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Posted by inforensics