Photo credit: www.engadget.com
Apple’s Reporting on Child Sexual Abuse Material Under Scrutiny
Concerns have been raised regarding Apple’s approach to reporting incidents of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detected on its platforms. The UK-based charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), has accused the tech giant of significantly underreporting cases, claiming that Apple submitted only 267 suspected CSAM instances to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) within the past year.
This figure is remarkably low compared to its competitors; Google reported a staggering 1.47 million cases, while Meta, the parent company of Facebook, disclosed 30.6 million potential CSAM incidents. Other social media and gaming platforms also surpassed Apple’s numbers, including TikTok (590,376), X (formerly Twitter) with 597,087, Snapchat at 713,055, Xbox with 1,537 and PlayStation/Sony Interactive Entertainment with 3,974 reports. In the United States, all tech companies are mandated to relay any suspected CSAM findings to NCMEC, which then coordinates with law enforcement agencies internationally.
Moreover, the NSPCC highlighted that Apple was linked to 337 CSAM cases specifically within England and Wales during the period from April 2022 to March 2023, a figure that exceeds the total number of worldwide reports made by the company in the same timeframe. The NSPCC obtained this information through freedom of information requests filed with police departments.
As reported by The Guardian, Apple’s platforms such as iMessage, FaceTime, and iCloud utilize end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which prevents the company from accessing user-generated content directly. However, WhatsApp, which also implements E2EE, notably reported nearly 1.4 million suspected CSAM cases to NCMEC last year.
“The disparity between the reported child abuse image crimes occurring on Apple’s platforms and their minimal global reporting raises serious concerns,” stated Richard Collard, NSPCC’s head of online child safety policy. “Apple appears to lag behind many of its industry peers regarding the fight against child sexual abuse, particularly as tech companies should be proactively investing in safety measures in anticipation of the UK’s Online Safety Act.”
In a previous announcement in 2021, Apple revealed its intentions to introduce a system that would analyze images prior to their upload to iCloud, comparing them against a database of known CSAM images curated by NCMEC and other organizations. However, due to substantial backlash from privacy advocates, Apple postponed the deployment of these detection tools and eventually abandoned the project in 2022.
When approached for comment on the NSPCC’s claims, Apple refrained from providing a direct response, instead redirecting The Guardian to its earlier statements regarding the cancellation of the CSAM scanning initiative. The company emphasized its commitment to a strategy that “prioritizes the security and privacy of [its] users.” In an August 2022 communication with Wired, Apple asserted that “children can be protected without companies combing through personal data.”
Source
www.engadget.com