GoKawiilBloomberg reports that the UK intends to introduce legislation that would require Apple and Google to “stop children from taking, sharing or viewing nude images on their phones and tablets.” Here are the details.
Apple says it plans to strengthen Communication Safety
The UK’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said in a statement to Parliament today that the government plans to introduce new legislation requiring major tech platforms, including Apple and Google, to build “device-level protections” meant to prevent children from “taking, sharing, or viewing nude images on their devices.”
The move, which she says will be brought to Parliament “as soon as we can,” follows a three-month deadline given to tech companies in June to introduce such protections voluntarily.
In her speech to the House of Commons, Nandy acknowledged that Apple and Google have made “meaningful changes” since then, but said those changes “do not meet the scale of this crisis.”
From her statement:
Children are facing unacceptable levels of sexual harm online. They are being groomed, coerced, and manipulated into creating and sharing intimate images across online services. The Internet Watch Foundation believes that 91% of these images are self-generated by children themselves. They are used for blackmail and sexual extortion. Each year, around 9,000 child sexual abuse offences involve an online element, with under 18s the subject of almost a quarter of online blackmail.
Nandy added that device-level protections are just one of two measures the government plans to pursue, the second being requirements for apps used by children “to prevent them from accessing or sharing nudity”:
We will explore what legislation is needed to implement this commitment, with a view to moving as quickly as possible. This will ensure that the whole ecosystem changes, tackling the means by which children are most often abused or groomed in the online world.
In a statement to Bloomberg, Apple said that it shares “the UK’s commitment to combating exploitation and abuse online, and have shared with UK officials future plans to strengthen Communication Safety and other tools even further to help keep kids safe.”
... continue reading