An online safety regulator has said that tech giants need to do more to combat sextortion (sexual extortion), naming Apple, Meta and Google among the companies who need to do better.
Victims of sexual blackmail tend to be younger, including children below the age of 16 …
A typical sextortion attack involves impersonating someone of the same age as the victim, engaging in online flirtation. The attacker at some point sends explicit photos claiming to be of them, and encouraging the victim to reciprocate.
If the victim does indeed send photos in return, the attacker threatens to expose them online, often saying they will use social media to send copies to family and friends unless paid to delete them.
TNW reports that Australia’s online safety regulator, eSafety, says tech giants are not doing enough to detect these attacks.
The specific failure named is language analysis. Sexual extortion offenders work from recognisable scripts, the same coercive phrases repeated across thousands of approaches, and the report says platforms are not deploying the technology that would spot them.
In Apple’s case, it says the company should be seeking to detect these scripts being sent via iMessage in much the same way that it detects when nude photos have been sent to children. The report also says that Apple needs to make it easier for victims to report these attacks.
Gaps persist across services including WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, and Google Messages, the report found, with some lacking a clear way to report sexual extortion or child abuse at all, and others offering no dedicated category for it.
The regulator says the problem is a large-scale one, with more than 10% of teenagers aged 16 to 18 falling victim to it – more than half of them saying it happened before they reach the age of 16.
9to5Mac’s Take
The scale of the problem appears to be dramatic, and there have been teen suicides linked to sextortion. I agree with the regulator that tech giants, including Apple, should be doing more to fight this crime.
iMessages are sent using end-to-end encryption. However, Apple’s existing nude image detection demonstrates that the company is able to perform on-device analysis on the recipient’s device without compromising privacy. A similar approach could be used to detect these scripts.
It’s possible Apple is already on the case. A developer spotted a malicious message detection feature in iOS 26.6 beta five.
Photo by Ricardo Alvarez on Unsplash
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