SocialNet

SocialNet is an popular investigative tool produced by the company ShadowDragon, which is designed to analyze publicly available social media data across over 200 platforms. It can connect online aliases, identify related accounts, and map relationships between people and groups. It is marketed to law enforcement agencies and other investigators, to help them track down individuals of interest, as well as the people they associate with.

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Designed for investigators, SocialNet® enables real-time insight and helps uncover identities, relationships, and behavioral patterns to accelerate investigations and threat analysis.

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Map connections between individuals and groups to understand networks of associates, coordination, and influence across social platforms.

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Using social media data, SocialNet also advertises that it can track the locations and movements of people over time.

Legal considerations

Generally speaking, data analytics based on social media activity, are considered public information by most judges. Although users likely do not expect or intend their social media activity to be used in this way, the data is often publicly available, and therefore acceptable to use without a search warrant, under US law.

Many social media platforms prohibit automated data collection (known as scraping) in their Terms of Service. By collecting these types of data about users, those terms of service are often being violated. This means that the social media platforms themselves might have grounds for a civil lawsuit, if they chose to pursue the matter. However, criminal law does not generally prohibit this data collection.