Are Thumbnails From Webpages Saved on a Phone?

Unsustainable@lemmy.today to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 21 points –

I tried Tor for the first time to see if I could find some public info on someone. A completely innocuous search for a government record immediately came up with a VERY inappropriate site with pics I wish I hadn't have seen. I deleted all history, but I don't want those thumbnails on my device. Idk if those thumbnails are saved or not. Doesn't anyone know for sure?

I thought you would have to intentionally search for things like that, but I was wrong. It's very disturbing how prevalent it must be to come up with just the search of a name.

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Don't worry about it too much OP. The other guy is right about it being cleared eventually from your cache, but the FBI has more important things to do than go after people who were unwittingly exposed to what I presume are illegal materials.

I've got to ask though OP... is your post really accurate? You've got to try pretty hard to find that kind of stuff on Tor. .onion sites aren't indexed like normal ones, and there are no huge search engines like there are on the clearnet. If you really were just looking for public records, Tor seems pretty unnecessary to me.

As I replied to the other comment, I simply searched a family member's name. I didn't really understand the results because they're not like regular search engines. I clicked on the first one and I just saw a LOT of very underage pics. I freaked out and immediately closed the browser. I was shocked that it was so easy to accidentally come across those things.

I'm not doubting you or saying you're lying but Tor's default search engine is still just normal DuckDuckGo. There are some search engines that index .onion sites, but they're not common and the overwhelming majority of them (in my experience) nuke any links to CSAM or related materials

Yeah i am with you on this op's story has a lot of plot holes . And that's not how you search onion sites.

Yeah dude is sticking to his story but searching someones name isn't how you find CSAM. Funny it happened the first time he used tor too 🙄 searching a person's name on DuckDuckGo.

OP for the sake of this earth I hope you're young. Please don't do that again. Don't bother trying to change my mind, I'm not going to believe you, just don't do it again.

Edit: In fact just delete this thread, because now you're admitting (probably not via tor) you viewed CSAM. If you keep looking at it, then you will eventually get caught, and your name will be on an inmate search website. They put their top guys and girls on 2 things: child abuse onions which is where they use the serious 0days to catch everyone, and drug markets.

Yeah op didn't think it through before posting. But also they could've been visiting other illigal onion sites for acceptible needs such as drugs and accidentally saw this and panicked.

When you visit a website, that website is downloaded into a temporary folder, the cache. Eventually that data will be deleted. Most of it will be deleted when you close the browser (after all, most websites reload when you visit them again), but things like search history (to remember where you've been) and cookies (to remmeber site specific settings) are stored for longer and you need to manually delete that if you want it gone. Those are functions of you browser though and your browser offers functionality to delete it as well.

If you really want to immediately clear all downloaded data from websites, like html and images, you can also manually clear the cache via your browser.

All of that is taken care of with tor browser. It's a modified version of Firefox writes nothing to disk. There are a few hidden places in the OS itself where some random memory might get stored until reboot or an app switch thumbnail, but with a reboot they should be 99.999% good to go even with forensic analysis.