Judge dismisses lawsuit accusing Apple of failing to stop CSAM on iCloud

Reuters reports that Apple has defeated a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing it of failing to stop child sexual abuse material from being stored and shared through iCloud. Here are the details.

Apple shielded by Section 230

U.S. District Judge Noël Wise has dismissed with prejudice a proposed class action filed in 2024, accusing Apple of “failing to stop the dissemination of child sexual abuse material through its iCloud data storage platform,” Reuters reports.

U.S. District Judge Noël Wise in San Jose, California, in a ruling late Monday, agreed with Apple’s argument that the company is immune from claims brought by plaintiffs who say Apple failed to take action to prevent images of their sexual abuse as children from being shared and stored on iCloud.

In the complaint, two survivors identified under the pseudonyms Amy and Jessica alleged that images of their childhood abuse continued to circulate through iCloud, and that Apple knowingly declined to use available tools to detect and report known CSAM.

The lawsuit specifically pointed to Apple’s decision to abandon NeuralHash, a system announced in 2021 that would have matched images uploaded to iCloud against databases of previously identified abuse material.

Amy and Jessica sought to bring the case as a class action on behalf of thousands of other survivors. Later court filings estimated that the proposed class included 2,680 people “and estimated the compensatory damages to be as high as $32.8 billion,” says Reuters.

They argued that the proposed class members were affected by the same Apple policies and product decisions, and that handling their claims together would reduce the burden and trauma of separate lawsuits. From the filing:

Class treatment would minimize the trauma that Class members would experience because of litigating their claims individually, and further promotes the remedial purposes of the federal statutes under which the claims are brought.

Back to the court’s dismissal, Reuters noted that Judge “Wise said the lawsuit sought to hold Apple responsible for failing to remove or block content created by users, placing the claims within the scope of Section 230 of ⁠the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 federal law.”

In a nutshell, Section 230 generally protects online services from being held liable as the publisher of content created by their users, and it has been at the center of years of debate over how much responsibility technology companies should bear for material shared through their platforms.

Reuters says that despite the case being dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled, “James Marsh, an attorney for the plaintiffs, […] said they are considering an appeal and evaluating whether other legal claims are possible.”

To read Reuters’ full report, follow this link.