Apple Quietly Removes Mention of Anti-Child Porn System From Its Website

For some reason, Apple has deleted mention of its controversial system to detect child pornography from its Child Safety website. 

As MacRumors points out, the website previously included a brief description of Apple's “Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM)” detection system, along with links to technical documents on how the technology is supposed to work. 

However, Apple's Child Safety website was changed in recent days to remove all mentions of the CSAM detection system, according to the Internet Archive. (That said, the company's original links to the technical documents on the technology remain online.)  

How Apple's Child Safety site looked on Dec. 10.
(Internet Archive)

How Apple's Child Safety site looks now.
(Apple.com)

The deletion suggests Apple is giving up on its controversial plan to use iPhones to combat online child pornography. But an Apple spokesperson tells PCMag that “nothing has changed” since September, when Apple said it was hitting pause on the CSAM detection system to gain more feedback and implement improvements.

Hence, it's possible Apple could be gearing up for a new attempt to sell the anti-child porn detection system to a skeptical public.

The company created the CSAM detection system to help crack down on child sexual abuse imagery stored on iCloud accounts. Other companies currently do this by scanning their own servers for child pornography across user accounts. However, Apple proposed an approach that involved using the consumer’s own iPhone to flag any child porn uploaded to iCloud. 

The proposal immediately faced resistance from privacy advocates and consumers over concerns the same system could be abused for surveillance or incorrectly flag photos. In response, Apple tried to explain why its approach was better for user privacy than server-wide scanning. Nevertheless, the harsh feedback was enough to cause Apple to delay its plan to launch the CSAM detection system, which was originally supposed to arrive with iOS 15. 

“Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features,” the company said in September. 

The same statement was also prominently placed on Apple’s Child Safety website. But it too has been removed.