Following the Digital Investigative Trail. How Digital "Currency" is Exposing

With the widespread adoption of social media sites and phone-based apps, users are leaving data trails everywhere. Often the companies behind these tools do not charge fees to the end users to use their software. Instead the payment method is the collection and reuse of the end user data gathered by the software applications. This data is in turn sold to data aggregators or directly to other companies that sell other products and services. As the data migrates further away from the end user, it is more widely available and less likely to remain in the ownership and control of the originator of the data. More and more often an investigation starts with internet-based searches to identify and analyze this data. The trend will continue to move in this direction. Internal Auditors can benefit greatly from understanding how to best integrate this new wealth of information in their audits and investigations. The future of both audits and investigations will need to rely more on technology but cannot neglect the impact and role of the “human element”. Points of particular interest include: •Personal assistants (Siri, google home, Alexa), •Analytics applied to social media sites, •Check in features showing real time locations, •The trend towards this data going directly to the public cloud, and •Data enablement on more everyday devices.