- Apple and Google were given three months to act.
- The government says their changes still fall short.
- Ministers now plan to legislate device-level protections.
Three months ago, the UK government gave Apple and Google a simple choice: make smartphones safer for children or face new legislation.
The deadline has now passed, and ministers have decided that the changes made by the two tech giants are not enough.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said Apple and Google had made 'meaningful changes' to their operating systems, but they did not meet the scale of the problem. The government will therefore begin work on legislation requiring major technology companies to build stronger protections directly into devices.
The question now is not whether Apple and Google have done anything. They clearly have. It is why those changes were not considered enough.
What did Apple and Google actually change?
The government had originally asked companies to find technical ways of preventing under-18s from taking, viewing or sharing nude images on smartphones and tablets.
Apple already had its Communication Safety system, introduced in 2021, which can warn children when they receive or attempt to send images containing nudity. It has since expanded the feature and introduced operating-system-level age assurance linked to some safety functions.
Google has also said it has made progress on child safety and is continuing to work with the government.
But the government says the problem is that these protections do not cover the entire device.
Its original demand went further. It wanted nudity to be blocked across the device by default, including through cameras, messaging services and other apps, with protections switched off only after age assurance.
That is a much bigger technical challenge than simply warning a child before they open or send an image.
The government's decision is being driven by concern over what happens when children create these images themselves.
The Internet Watch Foundation says 91 per cent of the child sexual abuse images it recorded in 2024 contained self-generated material. Such images can be produced after grooming or coercion and then used for blackmail and sexual extortion.
That is why ministers argue that protecting children only at the social media or messaging-platform level is not enough.
The proposed law would require device-level protections and would also extend restrictions to apps used by children. The government says this would change the wider technology ecosystem rather than relying on individual platforms to act alone.
The legislation could still be avoided if the companies develop and implement solutions while the government is working on the law. But Nandy has made clear that ministers are no longer prepared to rely on promises of future action.
For Apple and Google, that means the three-month negotiation period has effectively become a legal deadline.
The difficult part is making it work
The government's goal may be clear, but the technology raises difficult questions.
A system that stops children from taking or sharing nude images needs to establish whether the person using the device is a child or an adult. It may also need to identify the nature of images before they are sent or shared.
That has raised privacy concerns among digital rights campaigners and technology groups, particularly around age verification and on-device content scanning. Apple and Google have both stressed that child safety measures must also protect privacy.
The government insists its proposed approach will protect children without creating unnecessary surveillance.
That leaves ministers with a difficult balancing act. They want Britain to become a world leader in online child safety, but the technology needed to enforce that ambition has to work across smartphones, apps and different forms of private communication.
For now, the message to Apple and Google is clear: three months was enough time to show progress, but not enough to convince the government that the problem had been solved.
And that is why the next stage of Britain's child safety campaign is moving from negotiations with Big Tech to legislation.
