The prosecutor stated that images found on all the computers, (we have 2 teenagers, boys too.) showed images of young women that according to the expert witness for the prosecution, and based on the Tanner Scale of development (take note and look it up), he was being charged with possession or child pornography. The lawyer retorted with, - if there were any images on his computers, they were downloaded without his knowledge, or consent. The prosecutor added, - can you prove where those images were downloaded from so we may verify the age with their records? (of course he can't! He didn't know they were on there, and if he did, the prosecutor would not allow any of our representatives to take the computers to research with. All the girls they showed us on the sample, looked old enough to be 18, but the Tanner Scale said otherwise."
Basically, you have a situation in which a zealous protector of the community rights has used a scale, the Tanner Scale, to controversially determine the "exact" age of a young woman on a citizen's computer. The scale basically states that it is not an exact tool. Some humans, male or female, may be 18 years of age and still not have reached the full development stated on the tanner scale. This means, some of the porn sites will undoubtedly have pictures on their sites that will surreptitiously download onto your computer without a trace of origin. Therefore, even though you may have inocently visited a site, never purposely downloaded a picture that could be "tagged" as "child porn" based on the Tanner scale, you may be open to prosecution for possession of child pornography, unless it can otherwise be proven in writing with the appropriate documents, by you or the site of origin, that the person was at least 18 at the time the picture or video was taken.
Do you know if you have any pictures on your computer. Remeber the pictures don't have to be of naked young women or men. All it takes is someone not on your legal side to say they are under-age, and "under-age" they will be, unless you can prove otherwise.
Have you checked your computer lately?
Another quick tale. A father having heard of this situation, decided to do a simple check on his and his son's laptop at home. He used CCleaner to delete all those files that Ccleaner says it deletes. He had Ccleaner set to normal delete (basically deleting the first character of the file name, leaving the rest intact. He also had heard that Internet explorer "in private" deleted all those pesky files left from your browsing sessions. The Dad was feeling pretty good. Then, the son said "I heard of a cool program called Recuva". So the Dad said, "what the heck lets try it. It shouldn't find anything on any of our laptops!"
Well, the Dad set up Recuva to seach "other" files, (not just video and pics), and he set it up to delete with the DOD overwrite the file 3 times. He ran Recuva and to their suprise, almost 4000 files showd up when he chose the "thumb" option in the view screen. (screen where you decide to recover or delete.)
There were all kinds of pictures no one had seen before, Their jaws dropped to the ground!!!
The deleted all the files multiple times, each time DOD 3x. Then he ran it again to see if there was anything left. Nothing. Then he went into Internet Explorer and browsed a bit, and then ran Recuva again. This time hundreds of pictures he had not seen during his browsing were present on his drive. He deleted all and made sure. Then, he browsed again using "in Private Browsing", and ran Revuca again. Hundreds of pictures had been downloaded. Then he tried DuckDuckGo.com same test. Recuva did not see any pics or videos on the computer.
Aparently Ccleaner alone will not do it. (you do have to set it to DOD 3x, to make sure that what it does delete, it deletes well so not even Recuva can recover it.) RECUVA is the star here!! Run it right after you run Ccleaner. And if you know you are going into hostile territory, it doesn't hurt to wear protection (DuckDuckGo).
I don't know if this is enough to protect the normal household from "legal" innocent danger, but it sounds like a small price to pay (Ccleaner and Recuva and DuckDuckGo price, donation, whatever you want to call it.) to make sure your computer is "really" clean.