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What's the Deal with WhatsApp: Investigating and Discovering Mobile Device Data?

By Julian Sheppard and Michele C.S. Lange
September 02, 2017

Analyzing data from mobile devices is still uncharted territory for many in Legal and IT. Accordingly, today's modern legal and technology professionals need to brush up on all things mobile. This includes understanding where applicable data resides in a mobile device and what common challenges are associated with accessing, preserving and extracting this data.

To make things complicated, mobile devices contain more than just email, text messages and photos — all fully discoverable in litigation and ripe for investigation. Legal teams cannot forget that inter-application (“app”) chat communications may also contain relevant information. Each of these apps store content on the mobile device and function in slightly different manners, creating myriad data preservation, collection and privacy issues.

One such app taking the mobile device world by storm is WhatsApp. This article explores what legal teams need to know about accessing, preserving and extracting mobile data from WhatsApp, in light of recent news and privacy concerns.

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