If you want to know how to protect your privacy or reputation online, different sources will provide varying opinions and angles.
For the average internet user, using a VPN, password manager, or anti-virus software may suffice. But for investigators, legal teams, and compliance professionals, the stakes—and responsibilities—are significantly higher.
Not only are you tasked with protecting your own organization’s data, but you’re also responsible for protecting your clients from serious threats like identity theft, fraud, or harassment. These dangers often originate online—on websites, forums, and social media platforms where content can be altered or deleted instantly.
This makes collecting digital evidence as challenging as it is crucial. Ensuring the integrity and court-admissibility of such evidence requires specialized knowledge and a strategic approach. This guide outlines best practices for digital privacy, along with actionable steps to help legal and compliance professionals protect privacy online.
The Challenge With Capturing Digital Evidence
Online content is ephemeral and dynamic. A defamatory post that only stays visible for a few minutes can cause significant harm. A fraudulent marketplace can disappear overnight, taking along with it all traces of transactions. A perpetrator of identity theft can alter profile information to cover their tracks.
This volatility presents a fundamental problem for anyone responsible for collecting digital evidence. Traditional methods of capturing evidence may not hold up in legal settings, as they often lack crucial metadata that authenticates the veracity of the digital content.
For example, if you take basic screenshots to court, their integrity can be torn to shreds with questions like:
- When was this taken?
- Is this the complete page with all context?
- Could it have been altered with basic editing software?
Without important metadata, detailed chain-of-custody, and proof that the images aren’t altered, a seemingly clear-cut case of privacy violation can crumble. The evidence—and, with it, the hope for justice—evaporates.
Instead, to protect online privacy, professionals need a method to freeze a moment in the digital timeline. They must create a permanent, unchangeable record that is court-ready from the moment it is captured—one that strictly adheres to the various admissibility standards outlined in the Federal Rules of Evidence.
How To Properly Capture Digital Evidence
For digital evidence to be considered forensically sound, it must meet certain requirements. Investigators and legal teams should, of course, act promptly and capture the offending content in a legally valid format before it disappears.
But they must also ensure that the evidence collected is:
- Saved in the right format with relevant metadata and its original context.
- Accompanied by a clear chain of custody trail from the time of its capture. This means teams must clearly establish and document who collected the evidence, when and where it was collected, and what condition it was in when preserved.
- Saved along with cryptographic hashing or encryption methods that prove the data could not have been tampered with from the time it was captured.
- Preserved along with proof that it was stored in a secure environment, free from contamination or outside influence.
The Federal Rules of Evidence used to require that the collected evidence must also be analyzed by a qualified third-party expert who can vouch for its reliability and relevance. This independent assessor had to confirm that the actions and methods used to collect the data complied with all legal requirements before the evidence was presented in court.
Thanks to the Federal Rules of Evidence Amendments 902(13) and (14), witness testimony to the authenticity of digital evidence has been replaced by certification.
This allows for the certification of records by a qualified person who can verify the accuracy of the process or system that generated the records, eliminating the need for in-court testimony to establish authenticity. This means evidence can be authenticated through trusted processes of digital identification—typically using hash values and digital signatures.
Finally, teams and compliance professionals benefit when all evidence is stored in an interactive format that allows them to navigate the page as it originally appeared, with functional links and scrollable content. This makes reviewing and presenting evidence more effective than a folder of disjointed JPEGs.
By including all these authentications as part of the capture process, investigators create a verifiable chain of custody. This helps stave off any questions of authenticity and empowers organizations to build stronger, more compelling cases that help protect the privacy of their clients and internal teams.
Following these steps has become a crucial practice, especially as the scale and sophistication of digital threats continue to grow.
The Importance of Digital Evidence in Protecting Privacy & Reputation Online
Consider the following use cases of digital evidence to gain an understanding of the diverse dangers they pose:
1. Identity Theft and Impersonation
Executive impersonation is a growing concern for legal and compliance teams, especially when fake profiles are used to mislead employees, investors, or customers.
Say, for example, an organization finds a cloned LinkedIn or X account posing as a senior executive, engaging in conversations that purport to be legitimate. Using a tool like WebPreserver, teams can capture the fraudulent profile along with the full URL, public interactions, and associated content before it’s taken down. This evidence can support internal investigations, be used to initiate legal action against the impersonator, and help protect your privacy online. It can also be used to notify affected stakeholders and demonstrate incident response during regulatory reviews.
Incidents like this are not uncommon. According to the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center, impersonation scams rose by 148% between April 2024 and April 2025. A majority of the criminals (51%) impersonated a business, while 21% of the scams involved financial institutions.
2. Online Fraud and Scams
Online fraud can take several forms—from fake accounts offering incredible investment opportunities to catfish profiles promising love and affection in exchange for money. For compliance teams at financial institutions or lawyers representing victims, proving the existence and specific claims of the fraudulent operation is the first step toward asset recovery.
With WebPreserver, legal teams can preserve scam profiles and websites, along with fake testimonials, terms of service, and other types of fraudulent content. This evidence can be used to alert hosting providers, freeze further orders, or be used by law enforcement agencies.
In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission reported an alarming fourfold increase in the number of adults targeted by scammers posing as government representatives or businesses since 2020. For investigators and legal teams, collecting evidence of these fraudulent profiles and taking them to task can help protect their reputations and avoid litigation.
3. Defamation and Harassment
Malicious posts, reviews, or comments can destroy a person’s professional and personal life. The speed at which this content spreads—and can be altered or deleted—makes rapid evidence collection essential.
Legal counsel can use WebPreserver to capture the original defamatory statement and the ensuing thread of comments and shares, documenting the full scope of the harm and the audience it reached. This comprehensive record can prove valuable in lawsuits for libel, slander, or intentional infliction of emotional distress.
There is no lack of famous defamation cases to point to, but one of the most high-profile incidents of recent years involves two separate defamation cases against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.
Following the 2020 presidential election, many Fox anchors publicly discussed theories over whether the voting machine technology provided by the two companies had helped “steal” the election for Joe Biden.
In response, both companies sued Fox News’ parent company. After providing evidence for their claims, Fox agreed to pay Dominion more than $787 million in an out-of-court settlement. Smartmatic, meanwhile, has sought $2.7 billion in damages in a case that is—at the time of this article’s publishing—still sub judice.
4. Compliance and Regulatory Violations
For compliance professionals, privacy violations can also pose regulatory threats. An employee leaking confidential client information on a public forum, for instance, constitutes both a privacy breach and a potential regulatory offense.
Preserving the leaked information can help during internal investigations or audits and mitigate fines under privacy laws, such as HIPAA or the CCPA. Collecting evidence also demonstrates the company’s proactive approach to compliance and provides a clear record for bodies, including the SEC, FINRA, and various state and federal agencies.
How WebPreserver Collects and Stores Evidence
Given the numerous challenges associated with digital evidence collection, many organizations outsource the task to third-party software. WebPreserver is one such tool that helps legal and compliance teams preserve evidence and protect online privacy and reputation.
Here are some of key features of WebPreserver:
- Allows the capture of evidence from anywhere on the web, including social media sites, websites, forums, chats, and even the dark web.
- All evidence is captured with browser-extension in just a few clicks. Captures are also stored on your machine, which helps you maintain a full digital chain of custody.
- Equipped with a bulk-capture feature that allows you to collect entire websites and social media accounts. This includes timelines, expanded comments, emojis, replies, or all posts from specific time periods.
- All files are stored in fully searchable PDF and MHTML formats, allowing teams to quickly locate the relevant content.
- WebPreserver does what screenshots can’t—quickly collect and authenticate videos from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more. It automatically captures embedded videos and produces them for download in MP4 format.
- It stores all data with authenticated timestamps, SHA-256 hash, and encryption, proving that the content you captured is authentic and will stand up to scrutiny in court.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to proper evidence collection, WebPreserver addresses many challenges that investigators, legal teams, and compliance professionals face.
Book a WebPreserver Demo today to see what it can do for your team.
