In June, the UK government told Big Tech it had three months to make taking, viewing, or sharing images of child nudity on their devices impossible. “I expect tech firms to make that happen,” said then prime minister Keir Starmer. “But if they choose not to, then we will act and change the law.”
That deadline arrived on Tuesday, and the government says that the likes of Apple and Google have failed. As a result, they will be changing the law to introduce what the UK government claims will be world-first legislation of its kind.
While engineers from Apple and Google had been working with the government since June to make changes, “they do not meet the scale of this crisis,” Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media, and sport, told lawmakers on Tuesday as she introduced the legislation.
Under the new plan, companies failing to build the child protection solutions into all existing and newly sold smartphones and tablets in the UK would face fines and potential criminal liability for their bosses. “We know that this is a sector that can—when required—innovate at an extraordinary pace when the chips are down,” Nandy added.
Nandy also plans to explore placing similar legal requirements on apps used by children, like Instagram and Snapchat. Neither Meta nor Snap immediately responded to a request for comment.
“For too long, technology companies have failed to protect children from the worst harms,” Nandy said, “and to be frank, I am not prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt that progress will continue at the pace we need it to while harm is being done now.” Still, she said she would reassess whether legislation is necessary if platforms implement solutions while it is being drawn up.
“Apple and Google needed to urgently introduce these protections to ensure online sexual abuse is disrupted and prevented on children’s devices,” says Chris Sherwood, chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. “Now the deadline is up, government must crack down and legislate.”
Not everyone is so keen on the measures, which would not impact adults who had verified their age. In June, messaging app Signal accused the UK government of using the measures to rush “invisible surveillance infrastructure” into law. It warned that forcing UK residents to prove their age and have their content scanned in the name of child safety could be a slippery slope into wider surveillance.
Apple, meanwhile, says it is working with the UK government in the name of protecting kids. “We share 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,” an Apple spokesperson tells WIRED in a statement, pointing to its Communication Safety feature launched in 2021, which blurs photos or videos detected to contain nudity on a child’s device.
A Google spokesperson says in a statement that their team is “pleased to have made progress and are fully committed to continuing to work with experts, legislators, app developers and device manufacturers to keep children safe, while also protecting privacy and access to information.”
Globally, governments taking more extreme measures to protect children from online harms have been met with backlash over privacy and other digital rights. In the European Union, civil rights activists opposed extended legislation allowing tech firms to voluntarily scan users’ private messages for child sexual abuse material. Elon Musk’s X complained that the information-gathering powers imposed by Australia’s social media ban risk interfering with international law.
In the UK, Nandy also said the government was considering going further with its sweeping social media ban for children under 16, which was announced earlier this year and remains on track to go into effect in spring 2027. She is also looking at strengthening the law around AI chatbots to protect children on those platforms as well.
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