Overview
- Attorney General JB McCuskey filed the consumer-protection case in Mason County Circuit Court seeking statutory and punitive damages plus court-ordered product changes.
- The filing is the first known state-led lawsuit accusing Apple of enabling storage and distribution of child sexual abuse material through iCloud.
- West Virginia cites a 2020 message from Apple executive Eric Friedman calling iCloud the “greatest platform for distributing child porn” as evidence of internal awareness.
- The state points to Apple’s 2021 NeuralHash plan to detect known CSAM, its cancellation in 2022, and the rollout of expanded end-to-end encryption as design choices that reduced detection.
- Apple rejects the allegations, highlighting features such as Communication Safety and parental controls while asserting it balances child safety with user privacy; the complaint notes Apple filed 267 NCMEC reports in 2023 versus Google’s 1.47 million and Meta’s 30.6 million.