Can Apple and Google stop children from sharing explicit images?

Tech firms have three months to put in place measures that stop children in the UK from being able to create and share explicit images of themselves on devices – or face regulation to enforce this.

“I am calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce vice controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images,”  said UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a speech on 8 June. “This is not an impossible challenge. If they choose not, then we will act, and we will change the law.”

Apple and Google, creators of the world’s leading smartphone operating systems, have already partially implemented such controls. Apple’s iOS has a feature called Sensitive Content Warning, which detects when a device sends or receives an image or a video that contains nudity through its first-party Messaging or AirDrop systems, and then blurs it.  The system is turned on by default for child accounts on Apple devices, but doesn’t check images for nudity when they are taken – instead, it does so when they are sent or received. It works by running images through on-device machine-learning models to assess whether an image contains nudity.

Google also has a similar feature in its Android operating system, called Sensitive Content Warnings, powered by on-device machine learning, which is enabled by default for child accounts for images sent via its Google Messages service. It doesn’t work for video.

Both features are separate from the image hash list maintained by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which tracks digital fingerprints of known images of child abuse and is used by websites and social media platforms to prevent their ongoing sharing.

But extending these services to cover all smartphone apps, such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Signal or X, could be far more difficult, as it would require analysing content within a variety of different apps that operating system providers like Google and Apple don’t directly control. There is also the question of how to ensure that children can use only a child account on a device – currently, both Google and Apple require parents to explicitly set up a child account, and this isn’t done by default.

There are also questions about whether Apple’s current Sensitive Content Warning system could be used on all devices. It requires phones to be updated to iOS 17 or later – something that around 10 per cent of devices currently in use worldwide don’t have. Google’s equivalent is available only on Android 9 devices or later, meaning around 5 per cent of devices worldwide couldn’t use it. While specific UK figures aren’t available, this could amount to millions of devices.

New Scientist understands the UK government wants Apple and Google to extend those nudity-detecting systems to the phone’s camera and third-party apps, permitting explicit images only if users prove their age through age-assurance services – similar to the way that adult websites are inaccessible to those in the UK who don’t provide proof they are over the age of 18 since the introduction of the Online Safety Act in July 2025.

Such services have proved unreliable, however, and stories of children circumventing the checks are common. “Current approaches to age verification have largely failed at stopping young people from accessing adult content,” says Liam McLoughlin at Edge Hill University, UK.

“Blunt technological fixes also throw up a host of other issues – the unintentional restriction of access to educational or medical material, fostering a subliminal sense of ‘body shame’, and raising concerns about creeping censorship,” says Julian Hayes, a data protection lawyer at BCL Solicitors, a UK firm. “Tackling online harms requires tuition of children and teenagers in safe online behaviour, sex education which emphasises respectful relationships and calls out inappropriate behaviour, and necessitates that we are good role models ourselves,” he says.

“This is an approach that relies on technosolutionism and puts all the power into tech companies’ hands,” says Carolina Are at the London School of Economics. “This is just one of those things that is meant to make a headline, but it’s going to be even harder to enforce.”

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication. A Google spokesperson told New Scientist: “Google is deeply committed to protecting children online. We are working constructively with UK partners to find effective, privacy-preserving solutions that deter the spread of harmful content while ensuring a safe digital environment for young people.”