West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey (R) has sued Apple (PDF), accusing the Cupertino company’s iCloud online storage service of becoming the “greatest platform for distributing child porn.”
The Attorney General says Apple is prioritizing the privacy of its users over the safety of children, due to the storage and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on Apple’s cloud storage platform.
The lawsuit seeks statutory and punitive damages and also asks that a judge force Apple to put in place more measures to detect child abuse material.
“These images are a permanent record of a child’s trauma, and that child is revictimized every time the material is shared or viewed,” McCuskey said in the statement.
Apple has responded, and in a statement said it already has measures in place to prevent children from sending or receiving nude images.
“All of our industry-leading parental controls and features, like Communication Safety — which automatically intervenes on kids’ devices when nudity is detected in Messages, shared Photos, AirDrop and even live FaceTime calls — are designed with the safety, security, and privacy of our users at their core,” Apple said.
US-based Apple users will soon be able to flag inappropriate content directly to the iPhone maker via a “Report to Apple” feature.
The West Virginia lawsuit focuses on Apple’s end-to-end encryption, which prevents law enforcement or even Apple from accessing the digital files stored on an iCloud user’s account. The WV AG points to this technology as having allowed CSAM to thrived on the iCloud platform.
The Attorney General’s office cited a text conversation between two Apple employees saying the iCloud platform was “the greatest platform for distributing child porn.”
The West Virginia AG’s office argues that Apple’s actions (or lack thereof) have allowed illegal content to flourish and abusers to evade law enforcement.