Practical Mobile Forensics - Fourth Edition

Social networking applications

Commercial support for social networking applications is strong as they are the most popular apps downloaded from app stores. These applications allow users to make posts, share locations, chat publicly and privately, and essentially catalog their lives. Common social networking applications include Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Often, users will enable one app, such as Instagram, to have access to Facebook and Twitter so that posting is seamless. Hence, when examining devices, the user may find multiple copies of the same file or conversation due to the sharing that takes place between apps.

When examining these apps with commercial tools, it is common for chats and contacts to be parsed, meaning that other ...