The Supreme Court of India is hearing arguments from child protection organizations after the Madras High Court ruled that downloading and watching child pornography is not a criminal offense. In January, the High Court dismissed charges against 28-year-old S. Harish, who was caught in possession of two pieces of child sexual abuse material on his
I’ve seen Skype do that. It was a weird folder name, but gallery found it and displayed the images.
Which is how I noticed it in the first place
the gallery only found it due to shitty android skill issues.
Regardless, there’s still a dependence on the semantics here. You having a cache file of something showing up does not mean it was downloaded, it merely means that your phone considers it to be important enough to put it into the gallery, which is entirely arbitrary. And caching directories will, well, cache images, because sending them over the internet is expensive.
The semantics is that downloading is copying something from one computer system to another. Nothing about intent or permanence or whether it’s a temp/cache file or not. If you did not download the file, you cannot have seen it.
Whether you meant to do something or not does not change the action. The colloquial use of the word downloading to mean something different from streaming or browsing does not change the fundamental action.
In the case of WhatsApp, which is specifically in question here, it doesn’t “cache” images in a temporary folder. It saves the images to your devices media folders in their own library. So even by your definition, they’re being downloaded. Now, this is a setting which is on by default so maybe an individual doesn’t realise. It doesn’t mean they’re not downloading the content.