A Judge Just Recommended Congress Force Apple to Build iCloud Photo Scanning
By Ken Macon
Stand against censorship and surveillance: join Reclaim The Net
The judge admits the law “prioritizes privacy,” then treats that like a bug for Congress to patch.
A federal judge has handed Apple a victory that anyone wary of surveillance should welcome, and attached a request that should worry them. Apple cannot be sued for refusing to scan everyone’s iCloud for child sexual abuse material, U.S. District Judge Noel Wise ruled on July 13, dismissing a proposed class action with prejudice. She then asked lawmakers to compel the very scanning Apple abandoned.
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
The women behind the suit, using the pseudonyms Amy and Jessica, were photographed and filmed as young children while being abused.
They filed in 2024 on behalf of roughly 2,680 people with similar histories, seeking up to $32.8 billion and a court order requiring Apple to change how iCloud works.
Their case rested on a single theory: that Apple’s refusal to monitor everyone’s content and deploy detection tools was a design defect. As their complaint framed it, “Apple’s failure to implement any known CSAM detection is a design defect.”
Apple’s rivals took a different route. Microsoft and Google run a Microsoft-built tool called PhotoDNA across their services to flag known abuse images and report them to authorities. Apple went its own way, announcing a proprietary system called NeuralHash in August 2021 and promising it would guard privacy better than the competition.
That promise collapsed fast. Within a month, after it became clear that NeuralHash was “significantly less precise than PhotoDNA,” Apple delayed the rollout. By December 2022 the company had scrapped on-device CSAM scanning entirely and switched on end-to-end encryption for iCloud instead, making it far harder for anyone, Apple included, to inspect what users store.
Judge Wise never had to weigh whether that was the right call. She ruled that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields Apple no matter what, because deciding whether to run a scanning tool “is a choice related to content moderation,” and content moderation decisions are immune.
A significant part of her order is a plain statement of where the law sits. She wrote that “nothing in the law prevents any company, including Apple, from utilizing available technology or creating new technology to identify and report child pornography stored and distributed on their traditional servers or through their cloud services.” Then she added, “Conversely, there is no law that obligates companies to proactively do so.”
What followed reaches well past Apple. Wise wrote that “lawmakers can fix this problem that is contributing to the exploitation of children,” and, “This Court cannot.”