Apple wins dismissal of iCloud child abuse imagery lawsuit on Section 230 grounds

US federal judge has dismissed a proposed class action accusing Apple of failing to stop images of child sexual abuse from being stored and shared through iCloud, finding that the claims sit inside the liability shield of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Judge Noël Wise issued the order late on Monday. The dismissal is with prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs cannot refile.

The suit was brought by two survivors identified in filings as Amy and Jessica, who said images of their abuse as children continued to circulate on Apple’s cloud storage. Their claim turned on a detection system the company built, announced in 2021, and then shelved.

NeuralHash would have matched photos against databases of known abuse imagery before they reached iCloud Photos. Apple delayed it within weeks, after researchers and privacy groups warned that scanning infrastructure built for one purpose could later be widened to others, and abandoned it in December 2022.

The complaint was filed in the Northern District of California in December 2024 on behalf of a proposed class of 2,680 people, and initially sought around $1.2bn. Later filings put compensatory damages as high as $32.8bn, alongside a request that the court order Apple to detect, block, and report the material.

Wise found that the plaintiffs were asking, in substance, to hold Apple responsible for failing to remove or block content created by its users. That places the claims within Section 230, the 1996 law that stops online services being treated as the publisher of what users post.

She also found no federal law requiring Apple to build new tools or deploy existing ones to identify and report the material. “Lawmakers can fix this problem that is contributing to the exploitation of children,” she wrote. “This Court cannot.”

Wise had dismissed an earlier version of the complaint while allowing the plaintiffs to amend it. Monday’s order ends the case at district level.

The plaintiffs are “reviewing Judge Wise’s ruling and evaluating our options,” Hillary Nappi, one of their lawyers, told CNN in an email. James Marsh, also acting for the plaintiffs, said an appeal is under consideration, along with whether other legal claims remain available.

“This decision only adds urgency to the pending legislative efforts to ensure technology companies can be held accountable for the harm caused by their design choices,” Nappi said.

Apple has not commented publicly on the ruling. In its filings it argued that it had chosen other ways of addressing abuse material, among them Communication Safety, which warns children about sensitive images in Messages, over approaches it regarded as a risk to every user’s security.

When West Virginia’s attorney general, JB McCuskey, sued Apple in February over similar conduct, an Apple spokesperson said that “protecting the safety and privacy of our users, especially children, is central to what we do.” That case, in Mason County Circuit Court and billed by his office as the first of its kind by a government agency, is still live.

McCuskey’s complaint set out the reporting figures behind the criticism. Apple made 267 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2023; Google filed 1.47 million and Meta more than 30.6 million.

The ruling arrives in a year that has otherwise tested how far Section 230 reaches. Two cases got around it by focusing on design choices rather than user content, producing a $375m verdict against Meta in New Mexico and a smaller combined award against Meta and YouTube in California.

The question Wise handed back to legislators is not being settled quickly elsewhere. Europe’s Child Sexual Abuse Regulation has spent four years in negotiation over whether platforms can be compelled to scan private messages at all.

For Apple, the dismissal closes the larger of its two US cases over iCloud and abuse imagery, two months after a separate $250m settlement over Siri marketing in the same court. Any appeal would go to the Ninth Circuit. Apple has meanwhile asked that the West Virginia case be moved to federal court, arguing the state’s claims are preempted by federal law.