Apple is being sued by victims of child sexual abuse over its failure to follow through with plans to scan iCloud for child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), reports. In 2021, Apple announced it was working on that would flag images showing such abuse and notify the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But the company was hit with immediate backlash over the privacy implications of the technology, and ultimately .
The lawsuit, which was filed on Saturday in Northern California, is seeking damages upwards of $1.2 billion dollars for a potential group of 2,680 victims, according to NYT. It claims that, after Apple showed off its planned child safety tools, the company “failed to implement those designs or take any measures to detect and limit” CSAM on its devices, leading to the victims’ harm as the images continued to circulate. Engadget has reached out to Apple for comment.
In a statement to The New York Times about the lawsuit, Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz said, “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we are committed to fighting the ways predators put children at risk. We are urgently and actively innovating to combat these crimes without compromising the security and privacy of all our users.” The lawsuit comes just a few months after Apple was by the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).
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