Putting aside the fact that looking up a person's internet history is unethical and a breach of privacy regardless of your relationship to them.....
Sure, you can download them. Like mentioned, it would take a COM script to end up showing it in the history. A normal script wouldn't appear in the history.
As far as those being good for trading... trading for what? More pictures? You don't trade pics for software if you happen to be into warez. You don't trade pics for documents. Or for music.
