Child safety groups supplying data to Apple have included artwork as CSAM

San Francisco — August 12, 2021 — Collectors of Japanese artwork could be identified to Apple and possibly reported to police, warned child protection group Prostasia Foundation today.

The warning came in the wake of Apple’s announcement last Thursday that it would be updating all U.S. iOS and iPadOS devices to perform on-device scanning for child sexual abuse material (CSAM), using data supplied by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and other unspecified child safety groups.

“We know that artwork has been included in the CSAM databases that these groups maintain,” explained Prostasia’s Executive Director, Jeremy Malcolm. In January 2020, Prostasia Foundation, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Article 19, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, called for such images to be excluded from these databases. INHOPE, the international trade organization that includes NCMEC and other CSAM reporting authorities, declined to accept that call.

The legality of artworks that depict minors in nude or sexualized settings varies across the world. Although some such artworks are constitutionally protected in the United States, in June 2021 a Texas man was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment for publishing a number of stories, along with several drawn artworks, depicting fictional children in sexual settings. In May 2019, a 17 year old Costa Rican girl was arrested for posting Japanese-style drawings to her blog, on information passed on by Canadian authorities. 

Prostasia Foundation warns that such prosecutions are a misdirection of enforcement resources that should be reserved for crimes with real victims, and argues that such restrictions are not supported by evidence of harm. In 2021, the Foundation contributed over $50,000 towards research into the effects of fantasy and fictional sexual outlets.

“The fight against CSAM is, or should be, a fight to protect real children from harm,” said Malcolm. “We condemn Apple’s reliance on unaccountable private organizations to decide what images, including artwork, get included in CSAM databases. This will not save children from harm, and could indeed put them and other innocent people at risk.”

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For further information:

Jeremy Malcolm (Executive Director)
+1 415 650 2557 – [email protected]
Prostasia's website: https://prostasia.org