West Virginia sues Apple for alleged child sexual abuse material failures

West Virginia sued Apple Thursday for allegedly allowing iCloud to be used to disseminate and store child sexual abuse content.

The lawsuit is being brought under the state’s consumer protection law and is the first of its type to be filed by a government agency against Apple, according to a press release from the office of West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey.

Citing a February 2020 message from Apple’s head of fraud saying that the company is the "greatest platform for distributing child porn," the lawsuit alleged that despite its awareness of the problem, the company did nothing to stop it.

Apple announced plans to begin using child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detection tools in 2021, the lawsuit said, but abandoned the effort after a backlash from privacy advocates.

At the time, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other digital freedoms organizations decried the move, the lawsuit said.

“Initially, Apple defended its CSAM-detecting methods ‘as designed with user

privacy in mind,’” the lawsuit says. “But even with this caveat, Apple was not prepared for the backlash that followed, not from the general public but from a vocal minority of purported privacy advocates.”

The lawsuit also pointed to Apple’s habit of advertising itself as a company committed to privacy, citing multiple ad campaigns, including a billboard it sponsored in New York in 2019.

“Your iPhone knows a lot about you,” the billboard said. “But we don’t.”

Apple’s website states that privacy is a “fundamental human right.” 

It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it,” it says.

The company’s decision to abandon its plan to implement CSAM detection tools has led to an explosion of such content and caused the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to call Apple’s record on child protection “rotten,” the lawsuit alleged.

After Apple chose not to pursue CSAM detection, the child protection organization called the move “one of the greatest tragedies for survivors of child sex abuse, for families who have lost children due to that trauma, and for overall efforts to end this crime.”

An Apple spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

iCloud is designed to “make image- and video-based content easier to locate, view, share, and retain across devices and applications,” the suit said. 

“For users who traffic in CSAM, such functionality reduces friction associated with maintaining large collections of illicit material, enables repeated access and redistribution without manual file handling, and allows such material to remain available and organized over long periods of time — thereby contributing to the ongoing circulation and safeguarding of CSAM within Apple’s ecosystem,” the lawsuit said.

Federal law requires U.S.-based tech firms to report CSAM they find to NCMEC. In 2023, Apple made 267 reports compared to the 1.47 million filed by Google and 30.6 million by Meta, according to the lawsuit. 

Because Apple maintains end-to-end control over its hardware, software, and cloud infrastructure, it cannot say it is ignorant of CSAM distribution, according to the lawsuit.

“Apple's failure to deploy available detection technology is not a passive oversight — it is a choice,” the press release said. “Apple designed, built, and profited from the very system it allowed to be weaponized against children.”

The state is seeking statutory and punitive damages as well as a court order directing Apple to implement strong CSAM detection tools.