UK says it will force tech giants to stop children sharing nude images

The UK government will introduce legislation to force big tech companies to block children from taking or sharing nude images, culture secretary Lisa Nandy has said, in what she claimed would be a world first.

Nandy told MPs on Tuesday that the companies would be forced “to build in device-level protections for children” as part of the government’s work “preventing children from taking, sharing or viewing nude images on phones and tablets”.

The government would also require apps to block children from accessing nude pictures, she said.

“We know that this is a sector that can — when required — innovate at an extraordinary pace when the chips are down,” she added, saying legislation would be brought as soon as possible.

“These measures — taken together — will make Britain the first country in the world to go this far and a world leader in online safety,” Nandy said.

The move is the latest effort in the UK government’s ongoing battle to introduce stronger protection for children online — a policy that has widespread support among families across the UK.

In June, the government gave tech companies a three-month ultimatum to voluntarily introduce stronger controls preventing children from sending and receiving explicit images.

Nandy said Apple and Google — which operate the two dominant mobile operating systems, iOS and Android — had “developed meaningful changes” in the three months, but that “they do not meet the scale of this crisis”.

Just over half of UK smartphone users have an iPhone, according to the International Data Corporation. Samsung, which has a similar share of the global smartphone market to Apple, uses Google’s Android operating system.

The government has made online safety for children a key part of its technology policy, implementing strict requirements for adult sites to prevent children from accessing porn and other harmful internet content.

However, children can still access porn using virtual private networks and many overseas adult sites are ignoring the law entirely. This has led to discussions about tightening the law further, such as banning VPNs. British politicians and regulators are also planning to ban children under 16 from accessing social media and to restrict access to sites for those under 18.

Apple has an existing feature called Communication Safety — introduced in 2021 — which identifies and blurs images that contain nudity. It also introduced age verification requirements for apps with 18+ ratings in the UK in March.

But the company, which will unveil its latest family of iPhones on Wednesday in Cupertino, has stopped short of announcing further protections or direct device-level changes to the cameras on the iPhone to protect children. It has been consulting with the UK government over the past three months.

Apple said in a statement that it had continued to expand the capabilities of its “groundbreaking” Communication Safety feature since launch, including third-party support.

“We share the UK’s commitment to combating exploitation and abuse online, and have shared with UK officials future plans to strengthen Communication Safety and other tools even further to help keep kids safe,” the company added.

Google said the company was “an industry leader in combating non-consensual intimate imagery and advancing child safety across our products and services”. It remained “fully committed to continuing to work with experts, legislators, app developers and device manufacturers to keep children safe, while also protecting privacy”, it added.

Matthew Sinclair, a senior director at trade association CCIA UK, warned that “there are real technical challenges in moving too fast without undermining both privacy and the basic, secure functionality people expect from their phones. The government should continue to work constructively with businesses to improve protections.”