Can you verify website content to see if/when it's been changed?

[Ernie M]

Is there a way to legally verify the information contained on a webpage to see what it says one day, and to see if the information was later changes?

For example, say I visited a site at HereTodayGoneTomorrow.com
(I made up the name)
And say that one page contained a weather report stating:
Sunny
High of 80
50% Relative Humidity

And that information is what I want to prove that existed. Because, say someone went and changed that information a week later. If I visited the site, I would see the update (changed) information. But, I need to legally prove what it said before it was changed. Do you know a way to do that?

I know if I make a screen shot I can produce a jpeg image of what was on the computer screen at the time. And, if I select that jpeg without opening it, and go to the "File" menu and select "Get Info" I can see the Kind (jpeg image), Size, Where, Created, Modified, Dimensions, Last Opened, but I don't believe that viewing a jpeg image to prove what was on a webpage when the jpeg was made constitutes legal, undeniable proof of what was on the webpage and when. Can you tell me if there is a way to legally verify what was on a webpage at a given date and time?

[RecoveringYuppy]

If you're lucky a search engine or "the wayback machine" may have a cached entry for the date you need. Don't know if that would constitute "legal" for your purposes.

[EHLO]

Apart from a cached version somewhere else on the internet (or maybe in your browser?) you'll have a hard time getting such information.

Depending on how the web page is generated (static HTML or dynamically via script) you may be able to tell when the page was last modified as this should be contained in the HTML header information. It won't tell you what the page looked like before that modification date though, but would help if they claimed the page hadn't changed.

If you had access to their web servers (by court order etc) you might have more luck as web hosts usually do backups that would contain the older versions. Also, they might use a content management system that maintains a change history of page content. Either way, there are ways to cover ones tracks in such systems so unless you can get to their servers without the possibility of them tampering with them first then I'm afraid you're out of luck.

[iantresman]

Is there a way to legally verify the information contained on a webpage to see what it says one day, and to see if the information was later changes?

Legally no. But some sites leave a history trail, such as Wikipedia, and as mentioned earlier, the Wayback machine at archive.org may have a copy.