Facebook Content as Digital Evidence – Implications of Facebook’s Updated Messages

If you have been following our blog over the last few weeks you will have seen several posts about Facebook New Messages (FBNM), the updated messaging system which is currently being rolled out. We believe that Facebook New Messages will turn out to be the single most important development in online evidence this year and for that reason we will be continuing to write and speak about the evidential implications.

New Messages fundamentally changes the nature of Facebook and the associated risks, for example by introducing Facebook.com email addresses; adding support for attachments; and enabling logging of Facebook Chat conversations.

The introduction of FBNM will create both challenges and opportunities in terms of digital evidence and even with only a portion of Facebook users on the new system it is essential for investigators and legal professionals to be aware of the new system. To help those who have not read our previous blog posts we have summarized our initial analysis of Facebook New Messages into a single paper, titled “Facebook Content as Digital Evidence: Implications of Facebook’s Updated Messages Feature”.

This paper is now available for download: “Facebook Content as Digital Evidence – Implications of Facebook’s Updated Messages”. We hope that our work will help you to respond to the issues created by FBNM and we would love to hear your comments and feedback on this report, either in the comments section below or on Twitter (@CernamOE).