Social networking and chat applications helped skyrocket app-ready phones to the top of the mobile phone market. These applications, which allow users to keep in touch with their friends at any given moment, may be accessing and storing other information that the user is not expecting. Most of the social networking sites rely on contacts in your address book to further develop connections. Upon installation, most social networking or chat applications may alert the user with a friendly notification to let them know how many of their acquaintances are already using this application. How do they know? These applications commonly access the contacts or address book in your smartphone and load all that information as part of its internal database.

Mobile forensics utilities do a great job with chat and third-party messaging programs. They look at each of these applications and pull out contacts, calls, messages, tweets, posts, and more, and provide the results for review.