Attorney General JB McCuskey, a Republican, accused Apple of prioritizing user privacy over child safety, his office said in a statement on Thursday. It is called the first of its kind by a government agency over the distribution of child sexual abuse material on Apple’s data storage platform, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
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Apple has previously denied wrongdoing in a lawsuit by private plaintiffs making similar claims.
The company has considered scanning images but abandoned the approach due to concerns about user privacy and safety, including worries that it could be exploited by governments seeking other material for censorship or arrest, Reuters has reported.
“These images are a permanent record of a child’s trauma, and that child is revictimized every time the material is shared or viewed,” McCuskey said in the statement. “This conduct is despicable, and Apple’s inaction is inexcusable.”
His office cited a text message Apple’s then anti-fraud chief sent in 2020 stating that because of Apple’s priorities, it was “the greatest platform for distributing child porn.”
The state said it is seeking statutory and punitive damages, and that the lawsuit filed in Mason County Circuit Court asks a judge to order Apple to implement more effective measures to detect abusive material and to adopt safer product designs.
Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, and other platform providers check uploaded photos or emailed attachments against a database of identifiers of known child sex abuse material provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other clearing houses.
Until 2022, Apple took a different approach. It did not scan all files uploaded to its iCloud storage offerings, and the data was not end-to-end encrypted, meaning law enforcement officials could access it with a warrant.
Reuters reported in 2020 that Apple planned to implement end-to-end encryption for iCloud, which would have rendered data unusable by law enforcement officials. It abandoned the plan after the FBI complained it would harm investigations.
