Welcome to another edition of It’s in the Details, a short newsletter intended to provide helpful information for those in the litigation industry who deal with forensic engineering experts and their work.
Obtaining and Viewing Smartphone Data Is Easier Than You Might Think
Following up on our last newsletter in which we discussed how certain smartphone apps can record data regarding a vehicle’s activity in the moments surrounding a crash, we return this month to discuss how such data can be extracted from a smartphone.
We will leave it to the legal scholars in our readership to establish how one would properly request smartphone data, but once the phone has been made available, it can be accessed either (a) in-person by a forensic expert who connects a computer to the phone to make a full or partial copy of the phone itself, or (b) by using forensic software and provider access to obtain app data which may have been backed up to the cloud. The nice part about method (b) is that it doesn’t require the presence of the phone owner or the phone itself.
No matter how the data is obtained, it should be performed by a qualified expert like the folks we’ve worked with at Upstream Intelligence. They assisted our research on the “BMW Motorrad Connected” motorcycle app by imaging our company phone and allowing us to view relevant data via the forensic data viewing app “Cellebrite”:
This program makes it easy for a forensic firm like ours to identify and extract data relevant to the motion of a vehicle involved in a collision incident. In fact, it’s easy enough to use that even a computer-savvy layperson would be able to poke around the phone image for useful data.
Hopefully, this month’s newsletter has you considering requesting data from the smartphones of vehicle occupants in cases where there is little other evidentiary information available to your collision reconstructionist. Thanks for reading, and feel free to reach out to us with any technical questions you might have about this or other topics related to forensic engineering.