A judge has dismissed an attempted class action lawsuit against Apple, which accused the tech giant of failing to stop the storage of child sexual abuse material on iCloud.
A lawsuit from August 2024 that accused Apple of "privacy-washing" and failing to properly deal with the issue of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on iCloud has been dismissed.
In a ruling reported by Reuters on July 14, U.S. District Judge Noel Wise in San Jose, California, agreed with Apple's argument that it was shielded from the claims by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This refers to a section that protects online platforms from liability for third-party content, namely that of its users.
Representing the plaintiffs, Attorney James Marsh said that an appeal was being considered, as well as other potential legal claims. The attorneys claimed that the class of 2680 people were entitled to compensatory damages of $32.8 billion in total.
Under the ruling, Wise added that there's no federal law that would force Apple to create new tools or deploy existing technology to identify and report CSAM on iCloud.
"Lawmakers can fix this problem that is contributing to the exploitation of children," the Judge wrote in the ruling. "This Court cannot."
The lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice, so it cannot be refiled under the same claims by the plaintiffs.
A CSAM failure
The lawsuit arrived after Apple attempted to implement measures to help prevent the spread of CSAM. But, after considerable outcry, it abandoned its plans.
Back in 2021, Apple announced a suite of tools it wanted to release across its platforms. There were two chief areas, consisting of Communication Safety and CSAM detection in iCloud Photos.
Communication Safety, which is intended to help prevent children from seeing or sending objectionable material, is still being developed as a service. The most recent changes expanded from nudity to violence and gore detection.
The second, CSAM Detection in iCloud Photos, used cryptographic techniques to detect collections of that content, which would then be reported to NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children). The technique wasn't scanning actual images, but instead detected existing CSAM files using known hashes.
Apple received a lot of criticism, including complaints from experts at other tech companies, over privacy and security fears.
Apple ultimately killed off the iCloud CSAM scanning plan in December 2022. In August 2023, Apple provided a more detailed reasoning for abandoning the plan, after being pressed by a child safety group.
This included the potential creation of new threat vectors for data thieves to find and exploit. There were also fears it could result in unintended consequences, such as leading to bulk surveillance and more demand to search other encrypted messaging systems.
Damned either way
While Apple had basically given up on its CSAM detection plans, instead focusing on Communication Safety, the issue simply didn't go away.
A July 2024 report from the UK's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) accused Apple of vastly undercounting incidents of CSAM in its services.
Apple had made only 267 reports to NCMEC, as required by U.S. law, for incidents it detected globally in 2023. However, the NSPCC said that Apple was implicated in 337 offenses between April 2022 and March 2023 in England and Wales alone.
By comparison, Google reported over 1,470,958 cases in 2023, with Meta reporting 17,838,422 on Facebook and 11,430,007 on Instagram.
While Apple is not able to see the content of iMessage for CSAM scanning purposes, the NCMEC pointed out that Meta reported over a million suspected CSAM cases for the encrypted WhatsApp in 2023.
The now-dismissed lawsuit surfaced just one month later.
Aside from demanding damages, the lawsuit also wanted Apple to be forced to adopt CSAM measures. This included ways to prevent the storage and distribution of CSAM on iCloud, as well as making reporting more easily accessible and complying with quarterly third-party monitoring.
