According to a lawsuit brought by West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey, Apple has permitted iCloud to develop into a platform for the distribution and storage of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Apple has allegedly put its privacy branding ahead of its child safety responsibilities for years, according to the complaint, which was submitted to the Circuit Court of Mason County.
The lawsuit makes reference to purported internal iMessage conversations between Apple executives in 2020. During these discussions, Apple executive Eric Friedman allegedly voiced worries that the company was understating the extent of CSAM on its platforms. Friedman allegedly stated that Apple had “chosen not to know” the full extent of the problem in some areas, but he also called iCloud a significant platform for such material, according to the filing.
Additionally, in 2023, the Attorney General pointed out a glaring discrepancy in the numbers reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Google and Meta reported 1.47 million and 30.6 million cases of detected CSAM during that time, respectively, while Apple reported 267 cases.
Central to the legal challenge is Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which provides end-to-end encryption for iCloud photos and videos. The lawsuit contends that this encryption acts as an insurmountable barrier for law enforcement attempting to identify and prosecute offenders.
Apple defended its position, stating that “safety and privacy” are core to its product decisions. The company pointed to features like Communication Safety, which uses on-device processing to detect nudity in messages sent to minors. However, critics argue these measures do not address the storage and distribution activities of adult predators.
This filing follows other recent legal actions, including a 2024 class-action lawsuit in California and a specific case in North Carolina. While privacy advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that mandatory scanning and weakened encryption would compromise the security of all users, this lawsuit demands that Apple implement more aggressive detection tools and increase its reporting transparency.