During Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 8, local time, a group of rights activists staged a protest outside the visitor center at Apple's Cupertino campus, calling on Apple to remove "nudify" apps from the App Store and completely remove known child sexual abuse images from iCloud.
Protesters at the scene erected huge banners, accusing "Apple of being driven by child sexual abuse content" and asking incoming Apple CEO John Ternus: "What would you do?" Major groups participating in the action include the women's rights organization UltraViolet and the Heat Initiative, which is committed to holding technology companies accountable for child sexual abuse. Both organizations have long been concerned about the actions and inactions of technology platforms in combating sexual violence content.
UltraViolet and Heat Initiative pointed out in a brochure distributed on site that Apple and Google were widely criticized earlier this year for continuing to retain xAI's Grok and other applications in the App Store because users can use these applications to generate non-consensual sexualized deep fake images, including "undressing children" content, triggering strong concerns from all walks of life that they may constitute child sexual abuse material.
Citing data from the Tech Transparency Project, these organizations stated that at least 47 related "strip and face-swapping" apps can currently be found on the Apple App Store; according to their estimates, Apple's revenue from these apps alone is "at least approximately $117 million," of which Grok alone may contribute "more than $35 million" in revenue to Apple. UltraViolet also launched a dedicated event website to display demands and materials against Apple's protest actions.
Protesters also took aim at Apple's policy evolution regarding the identification and processing of child sexual abuse images. Apple had planned to introduce an automatic scanning mechanism in iCloud to identify and report child sexual abuse images, but the plan was officially halted by the company in 2022 after privacy controversies continued to ferment. Since then, Apple has always attracted attention from the outside world on how to balance user privacy and child protection.
At present, the protests are still mainly concentrated in venues around the parent company's campus, and it remains to be seen what the subsequent development of the activities will be and whether Apple will make adjustments to its application review or cloud content management policies.