Apple Adds Child Safety Features to iOS 27

Apple has announced new child safety features for iOS 27 and other platforms, set to arrive this fall after spending significant time on the topic during its June Worldwide Developers Conference keynote.

Apple spent 10 minutes of its WWDC keynote on child safety. The company highlighted upcoming features for iPhones and other devices during the event in June. This marked a notable shift, as the topic had not previously received such attention in keynotes.

Sarah Gardner, founder and CEO of the Heat Initiative nonprofit, was protesting outside Apple Park at the time of the announcement. It was her fifth protest there focused on child protection guardrails in Apple products. Gardner described the keynote coverage as a huge win that would not have happened a few years ago.

Advocacy and lawsuits have pressured Apple on child safety. Gardner, with 15 years in online trust and safety, said Apple had been consistently absent from child safety conversations for a decade. She noted that advocacy efforts and ongoing lawsuits have forced the company to address the issue more broadly.

Apple currently faces a lawsuit from West Virginia alleging that its business practices safeguard child sexual abuse materials, known as CSAM. The CSAM debate traces back several years to Apple's announced photo-scanning tool for iCloud that was later abandoned after criticism from privacy and security experts. Apple had told the Heat Initiative that it was not practically possible to implement the tool without imperiling user security and privacy.

Gardner views the new features as a positive but not groundbreaking step. While she does not consider the iOS 27 updates groundbreaking for improving children's safety on Apple products, she called them a positive development. Gardner continues to advocate for the CSAM detection tool, arguing it can balance child safety and privacy.

Her June protest also highlighted "nudify" apps on the App Store, with the Tech Transparency Project identifying 47 such apps in January that use AI to remove clothing from photos. WIRED reported in 2024 that single-sign-on systems from companies including Apple enabled easy sign-ups for deepfake websites, after which Apple removed connected developer accounts. Gardner questioned why the Grok app, which hosted sexualized deepfakes as recently as June, remains available.

Apple enforces guidelines against nudification apps but has faced criticism for inconsistency. The company states that nudification apps violate its guidelines and that it has proactively rejected many while removing others flagged through reporting tools. Apple did not address why Grok remains on the platform. It pointed instead to its existing Communication Safety feature, which blocks images.