At last year’s WWDC, Apple presented a couple of innovations in its products that the company seemed to think would be uncontroversial, but which in fact caused users as well as researchers and privacy activists to backfire. One was a feature that scans all the user’s photos uploaded to Icloud after child porn, the other a nude filter for Imessage for child accounts.
The child porn filter received extremely harsh criticism from many quarters. Apple has not implemented it yet and may never do so. The nude filter for Imessage, on the other hand, has been launched in the US in iOS 15.2 and is rumored to be coming to other English-speaking countries soon. After that, it will continue to roll out and eventually also come to Sweden.
This is how the filter works
Messaging communication security, as Apple calls the feature, is enabled for a child account on Icloud in the family sharing settings in the coordinating parent’s Icloud settings. It is therefore never activated automatically.
When active, the filter applies to all devices the child is logged on to, as long as the system is updated to a version that supports it.
The filter itself consists of machine learning algorithms that analyze all images sent to users, including images sent by the user. If an image is judged to contain naked people, different things happen depending on whether it is an incoming or outgoing image.
For pictures sent from others, Messages hides the picture and shows a warning that it may be “sensitive”. If the child presses “show image”, more detailed information about why the warning is there is displayed, and the child can then choose to ignore or observe the warning.
For images the child tries to send, the message is stopped with a similar warning and the child must confirm that it understands the risks of sending nude images to others before it can proceed and force the app to send it.
No warnings to parents
When Apple introduced the feature, it also received criticism from privacy experts. This was because the company intended that Messages would automatically inform the parents if a child under the age of 13 showed or chose to send an image that was judged to contain nudity of the filter.
Apple has responded to that criticism by simply deleting that type of message to parents. Children who themselves want to tell their parents that they seem to have received nude photos of strangers (or acquaintances) can voluntarily notify them, but the function itself no longer sends any information at all from the phone. The filter function itself runs completely on the device and does not break Imessage’s total stretch encryption.
Children over the age of 13 can create their own iCloud accounts that are not linked to family sharing, in which case the feature can not be activated.
Unknown when it comes to Sweden
Language, cultural differences around nudity and law are all obstacles for Apple to quickly roll out the nude filter globally. Therefore, it is unknown how long it may take before it affects Swedish users when communicating with others in Sweden.
With that said, Swedish users can also encounter the filter if they send pictures to American (and soon British, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian) users.
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