Apple sued for more than $1 billion for abandoning tool that combats child abuse

Apple was sued for abandoning the idea of ​​launching a platform. Detect and remove child abuse material (CSAM) and other related crimes on the brand’s devices. The lawsuit was filed in a district court in the United States state of California.

The person who went to court against the company was an American woman who claimed that she had been sexually abused by a relative in her childhood. According to him, documents were recorded from the time when he was the victim of this crime, and at least until a few years ago, was still stored on Apple devices and iCloud accounts.

According to the person who filed the lawsuit under a pseudonym, the Apple tool introduced in 2021 even informed him that other people had material about him. However, when the company gave up on the platform, victim says company ‘broke its promise’ to protect victims abuse

Victim Seeking compensation from a group of 2,680 potential victims which may be damaged to varying degrees by the absence of tools. The total value will exceed 1.2 billion dollars (More than R$7.2 billion in direct currency conversion). Moreover, the brand will have to reverse the decision and continue the project.

remember the case

In early August 2021, Apple announced a new digital service to detect child abuse stored in iCloud accounts. The mechanism would be: Can “read” images and videoscompare them with databases and even file a complaint with the responsible institutions.

But criticism from privacy advocates and cybersecurity researchers caused the company to reevaluate the platform; Reading files, even for a legitimate reason, can be risky from a data protection perspective and can lead to or even open the door to dangerous false positives. possible threats.

A few months after the implementation, Apple delayed the launch of the service to re-evaluate it and quietly never mentioned the problem again. It was this abandonment that caused the person responsible for the process and other victims who experienced similar cases to complain about the brand’s attitude.

This is the second similar process that Mação has faced based on the company’s decisions on how to deal with CSAM. Moreover, he had already been criticized by institutions in the region for not handling the issue properly after the debate.

In an official note posted on the website TechCrunchthe company simply stated: “innovate urgently and actively To fight these crimes without compromising the security and privacy of all users“.