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Prior Publisher

The Association of Digital Forensics, Security and Law (ADFSL)

Abstract

Because of Facebook’s popularity, law enforcement agents often use it as a key source of evidence. But like many user digital trails, there can be a large amount of data to extract for analysis. In this paper, we explore the basics of extracting data programmatically from a user’s Facebook via a Web app. A data extraction app requests data using the Facebook Graph API, and Facebook returns a JSON object containing the data. Before an app can access a user’s Facebook data, the user must log into Facebook and give permission. Thus, this approach is limited to situations where users give consent to the data extraction.

References

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