Digital Forensics and ‘self-tracking’
by Chris Hargreaves
This month's article is based very loosely around a recent 5-minute talk from Gary Wolf which explores the concept of ‘self-tracking’ (the trend for people to record aspects of their life) and how this can now be performed to a much greater extent than was previously possible due to changes in technology. The talk discusses the monitoring of heart rates, sleep patterns, consumption of caffeine, food and alcohol etc. While many of these could be recorded simply with a pen and paper, the talk also introduces a variety of new digital devices that automate the collection, recording and in some cases transmission of this ‘self-tracking’ data. This article ponders the implications of such devices for digital forensics. ..
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Chris
Good article in raisng awareness of where we may need to look for digital evidence, have heard some talk recently around data stored in car engine managment systems, and even data stored in a microwave oven. I guess anything capable of using data to set timings is capable of storing that data, so ovens, central heating systems may all be fair game in the future. Taking all of this data its not going to be a difficult task to establish patterns of peoples lives.