In a real investigation, law enforcement agencies may have access to data from the social networking providers.
Depending on the nature of the investigation, jurisdictional issues and the degree to which the social networking provider is co-operative with law enforcement, the provider may prove to be a more convenient source of digital evidence about social networking use than the smartphone.
However, investigation the smartphone has two-fold value.
It is often useful to corroborate evidence from different sources, such as from the provider and then from the smartphone.
Moreover, especially in an era of ubiquitous mobile Internet connections, many traditional telephony services (such as text messaging) are provided via social networking sites through their smartphone apps.
It may be crucial to the reconstruction of a crime to know whether particular social networking activities (already reflected in data from the service provider) took place on a particular smartphone.