West Virginia blames Apple for shielding child predators: “greatest platform for distributing child porn”

The US State of West Virginia is suing Apple for failing to detect and report child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on users’ iCloud accounts.

West Virginia’s Attorney General JB McCuskey has filed a lawsuit against the tech company for allowing iCloud to be used as a distribution platform for spreading child pornography and willingly choosing not to intervene.

“Preserving the privacy of child predators is absolutely inexcusable. And more importantly, it violates West Virginia law. Since Apple has so far refused to police itself and do the morally right thing, I am filing this lawsuit to demand Apple follow the law, report these images, and stop re-victimizing children by allowing these images to be stored and shared,” McCuskey said in a press release.

According to the lawsuit, in an internal communication, Apple has described itself as the “greatest platform for distributing child porn.” Yet, the company neglected to take meaningful action to stop this.

Instead, Apple dodged its responsibility to protect children under the guise of user privacy and maintained its ecosystem to facilitate the persistence, accessibility, and dissemination of CSAM.

The indictment refers to Apple’s 2021 NeuralHash, a proprietary set of CSAM detection tools that allows it to scan Apple devices for images of child pornography and child abuse before encryption. However, human rights groups criticized Apple’s proposal of client-side scanning, suggesting it would be the first step in implementing a comprehensive surveillance system.

Even Apple employees, who rarely share their criticism with the outside world, feared that client-side scanning could be abused by authoritarian regimes to monitor dissidents and activists and impose government censorship. Therefore, Apple decided not to roll out its CSAM detection tools, to West Virginia’s dismay.

Furthermore, according to the plaintiff, Apple’s failure to deploy CSAM detection technology that was available is “not a passive oversight,” but rather a choice.

“The State of West Virginia seeks to hold Apple accountable for its knowing misrepresentations and unlawful conduct arising from its CSAM practices and its choices in designing the iCloud infrastructure,” the lawsuit reads.

“As a direct and proximate result of its conduct, Apple is liable under multiple, independent theories of law, including strict liability for design defect, negligence for failing to implement adequate CSAM reporting technologies, creating or contributing to a public nuisance by facilitating the storage and hosting of unlawful CSAM content,” the indictment continues.

The Attorney General’s Office is seeking statutory and punitive damages. In addition, it wants the court to order Apple to implement effective CSAM detection measures and improve the company’s product design.

In a statement to Reuters, Apple said it has implemented features that prevent children from uploading or receiving nude images and was “innovating every day to combat ever-evolving threats and maintain the safest, most trusted platform for kids.”