Ride the Lightning

Craig Ball on Preserving Alexa’s History: It Ain’t Pretty, But It Works

March 28, 2018

Some time ago, John and I were enjoying a delightful dinner with our friend Craig Ball and spent, as folks in digital forensics are wont to do, a lot of time musing over developments in the e-discovery and digital forensics world. Craig's recent blog post on preserving Alexa's history brought that dinner to mind because, apparently, there has been no forward motion on making Alexa's history easy to preserve. This presents quite a challenge to a litigant under a duty to preserve relevant data.

In fact, things have gotten worse because Echo products have soared in popularity and the Alexa interface has been integrated into so many devices that the problem is exacerbated.

Read Craig's post to understand just how unwieldy and time-consuming the preservation process is. It is, as Craig says, maddening and the data is not fielded for retrieval or sorting. Amazon could easily resolve this problem, but it has not – and yet a litigant's preservation duty doesn't vanish simply because preservation is infuriatingly slow.

So Craig set out to find an easy, no-cost way to preserve the historical data. As he concedes, his solution in inelegant, but it is dead simple and doesn't require special software or expertise.

Read the methodology (it really is simple) and hang on to Craig's post in case you need to reference it – as is so often true, Craig has charted previously uncharted territory.

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