Apple is failing to effectively monitor its platforms or scan for images and videos of the sexual abuse of children, child safety experts allege, which is raising concerns about how the company can handle growth in the volume of such material associated with artificial intelligence.
The UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) accuses Apple of vastly undercounting how often child sexual abuse material (CSAM) appears in its products. In a year, child predators used Apple’s iCloud, iMessage and Facetime to store and exchange CSAM in a higher number of cases in England and Wales alone than the company reported across all other countries combined, according to police data obtained by the NSPCC.
Through data gathered via freedom of information requests and shared exclusively with the Guardian, the children’s charity found Apple was implicated in 337 recorded offenses of child abuse images between April 2022 and March 2023 in England and Wales. In 2023, Apple made just 267 reports of suspected CSAM on its platforms worldwide to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which is in stark contrast to its big tech peers, with Google reporting more than 1.47m and Meta reporting more than 30.6m, per NCMEC’s annual report.
I’m not sure what you are getting at. Apple offer storage and offer to encrypt that storage. You think that should be illegal? What about Apple offering storage and I encrypt stuff myself before storing it? What about a self storage company where I hire a container and put my own padlock on it? Or the self storage company has a duplicate key, but then I store a locked safe in it? And even if you could get Apple to change their ways: what about Amazon cloud storage - a lot of companies and agencies would be very unhappy if Amazon could scan their data. CSAM is a problem. But abandoning all privacy and security is not the solution.