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 â or face regulation to enforce this.
âI am calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce vice controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images,â Â said UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer . âThis is not an impossible challenge. If they choose not, then we will act, and we will change the law.â
Apple and Google, creators of the worldâs leading smartphone operating systems, have already partially implemented such controls. Appleâs 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. Â The system is turned on by default for child accounts on Apple devices, but doesnât check images for nudity when they are taken â instead, it does so when they are sent or received. It works by on-device machine-learning models to assess whether an image contains nudity.
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Google also has a similar feature in its Android operating system, called , powered by on-device machine learning, which is enabled by default for child accounts for images sent via its Google Messages service. It doesnât work for video.
Both features are separate from 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 donât directly control. There is also the question of how to ensure that children can use only a child account on a device â currently, both Google and Apple require parents to explicitly set up a child account, and this isnât done by default.
There are also questions about whether Appleâs current Sensitive Content Warning system could be used on all devices. It requires phones to be updated to iOS 17 or later â something that currently in use worldwide donât have. Googleâs equivalent is available only on Android 9 devices or later, meaning of devices worldwide couldnât use it. While specific UK figures arenât available, this could amount to millions of devices.
51¶ŻÂț understands the UK government wants Apple and Google to extend those nudity-detecting systems to the phoneâs camera and third-party apps, permitting explicit images only if users prove their age through age-assurance services â similar to the way that adult websites are inaccessible to those in the UK who donât 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. âCurrent approaches to age verification have largely failed at stopping young people from accessing adult content,â says at Edge Hill University, UK.
âBlunt technological fixes also throw up a host of other issues â the unintentional restriction of access to educational or medical material, fostering a subliminal sense of âbody shameâ, and raising concerns about creeping censorship,â says , a data protection lawyer at BCL Solicitors, a UK firm. âTackling 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,â he says.
âThis is an approach that relies on technosolutionism and puts all the power into tech companiesâ hands,â says at the London School of Economics. âThis is just one of those things that is meant to make a headline, but itâs going to be even harder to enforce.â
Apple didnât respond to a request for comment in time for publication. A Google spokesperson told 51¶ŻÂț: âGoogle 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.â
