West Virginia’s attorney general sued Apple (AAPL.O) on Thursday, accusing the iPhone maker of allowing its iCloud service to become what the company’s own internal communications called the “greatest platform for distributing child porn.”
Attorney General JB McCuskey, a Republican, accused Apple of prioritizing user privacy over child safety. His office called the case the first of its kind by a government agency over the distribution of child sexual abuse material on Apple’s data storage platform.
“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 in a statement 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.”
“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.
Apple on Thursday said it plans to roll out a feature in the coming weeks that allows users in the U.S. to flag inappropriate content such as nudity directly to Apple via a “Report to Apple” feature. This is already available in Australia and the United Kingdom. Apple said the expansion was previously planned and not in response to West Virginia’s lawsuit.
The U.S. has seen a growing national reckoning over how smartphones and social media harm children. So far, the wave of litigation and public pressure has mostly targeted companies like Meta, Snap, and Google’s YouTube, with Apple largely insulated from scrutiny.
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