Tuesday 09 June 2026 5:01 am
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Monday 08 June 2026 1:48 pm
LONDON, ENGLAND - JUNE 08: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivers a speech during London Tech Week at Olympia on June 08, 2026 in London, England. Attracting the world's leading tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud, London Tech Week brings together industry innovators, policymakers, and investors to discuss the latest breakthroughs in the world of tech. This year the Deep Tech Stage features innovations in the fields of space, robotics, sciences, quantum and AI. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
In practice, the government is demanding that Apple install on-device AI nudity-detection software at the operating system level for iOS and that Google do the same for Android. This would involve constantly scanning the camera viewfinder, screen output, livestream, and stored files, and blocking or blurring nudity in real time. This amounts to surveillance technology on every device in the country, says Matthew LeshIn the midst of an interregnum in Labour’s civil war, Keir Starmer is on the hunt for something extremely dangerous: a legacy. His latest play is a call for tech companies to introduce device controls that prevent children from taking, sharing or viewing sexually explicit images on devices. “Because this is not an impossible challenge. These are some of the most innovative companies in the world,” Starmer told London Tech Week, “And I believe they can solve it. If they choose not to, then we will act, and we will change the law.”Starmer’s proposal is, on the face of it, entirely reasonable. Nobody wants to see children threatened. But technically speaking, and for our basic civil liberties, this policy is extremely problematic.In practice, the government is demanding that Apple install on-device AI nudity-detection software at the operating system level for iOS and that Google do the same for Android. This would involve constantly scanning the camera viewfinder, screen output, livestream, and stored files, and blocking or blurring nudity in real time. This amounts to surveillance technology on every device in the country. It will make our devices much easier to exploit by bad actors, opening a whole new vector of attack by hackers and hostile foreign governments. There’s a reason world leaders and intelligence officials cover or remove cameras from their devices. We can only expect this policy to make things worse.The Home Office has suggested that this scanning be turned on by default on all iOS and Android devices, with users required to verify their age via biometrics or ID to disable the block. But that, in itself, raises further concerns about our privacy, as it means handing over additional sensitive information, often to a third party. Not just theoreticalThis isn’t just a theoretical threat. Last October, hackers compromised a customer support vendor used by Discord, stealing around 70,000 government ID images, including passports and driving licences, along with users’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, and support messages. The data was then used to extort the company. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it, “Age verification systems are surveillance systems.”Children will also inevitably find workarounds to age verification, as Australia’s much-heralded under-16 social media ban demonstrates. Implemented only in December last year, surveys suggest a majority of Australian children under 16 admit to still having active social media accounts, with most children saying circumventing the ban was ‘easy’. Methods range from the mundane (using a parent’s account or an older sibling’s ID) to the creative. One Reddit thread suggested using a printed mesh face mask from Temu to defeat facial recognition. Others simply migrated to platforms outside the ban’s scope. Mandating on-device nudity scanning would fare no better; a child with access to any adult’s phone, a VPN, an older device, or a foreign handset is immediately outside its reach.
