West Virginia sued Apple on Feb. 19, claiming the company knowingly allowed its iCloud platform to be used to distribute and store child sexual abuse material for years without taking action to stop it.
“Preserving the privacy of child predators is absolutely inexcusable,” West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey said in a statement.
The state alleges Apple violated West Virginia’s Consumer Credit and Protection Act.
The lawsuit, filed in Mason County Circuit Court, is the first of its kind brought by a governmental agency against Apple over child sexual abuse material, according to the attorney general’s office.
McCuskey claims Apple made fewer than 300 reports of child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, while Google made more than 1.47 million reports and Meta made more than 30.6 million.
In the lawsuit, the state claims Apple management knew it had problems with child pornography on its platforms, according to internal communications, but allegedly took no meaningful action to stop it.
In 2021, Apple announced a set of detection tools that allegedly would have limited the presence and spread of the materials by detecting them and reporting them to the national center, but in 2022, the company abandoned the project, according to the lawsuit.
“Since Apple has so far refused to police themselves and do the morally right thing, I am filing this lawsuit to demand Apple follow the law, report these images, and stop re-victimizing children by allowing these images to be stored and shared,” McCuskey said.
West Virginia is seeking statutory and punitive damages and asking the court to require Apple to implement detection measures for the material on its platforms and to make safer products going forward.
Apple didn’t immediately return a request for comment about the lawsuit.
The lawsuit is the latest legal action taken as tech companies face a surge of lawsuits related to sexual materials on their platforms.
Apple CEO Tim Cook at an event at Apple Park in Cupertino, Calif., on March 8, 2022. (Brooks Kraft/Apple Inc./Reuters)
In January, California Attorney General Rob Bonta opened an investigation into alleged sexually explicit material produced by Grok, an artificial intelligence model developed by xAI.
Bonta said he became aware of the possible problem after hearing numerous news reports of Grok users taking images of women and children off the internet and asking Grok to depict the images in sexually explicit scenarios.
In another case, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Snap Inc. for allegedly allowing the platform to expose children to sexual content on its Snapchat platform without warning parents and consumers.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is also facing litigation by more than 40 states alleging its platforms are designed to addict children and expose them to sexual exploitation.
