New Delhi: Britain will become the first country in the world to make it impossible for children to click, share, or view nude images, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a speech at London Tech Week.
On 8 June, the UK government asked big tech companies, including Apple and Google, to introduce features on smartphones and tablets to detect and block naked images for children. The companies have three months to implement the new features.
“I expect tech firms to make that happen. This is not an impossible challenge – these are some of the most innovative companies in the world. But if they choose not to, then we will act and change the law,” Starmer said.
The changes will apply to devices sold in the UK, and the legislation is expected to cover system providers and even retailers.
Apple has already announced a suite of new features for enhanced parental control. At the Worldwide Developers Conference 2026 Monday, the company announced the Child Account, through which a parent will be able to monitor the content their child views, the people they communicate with, and the time of day they can use an app.
However, Signal has opted for a different route. In a statement on X, the secure messaging app said that instead of protecting British children, the UK government’s demand “endangers us all”.
“It endangers us all, whilst strengthening Apple, Google, and Microsoft’s market dominance and their control over our most personal information,” the statement read.
The document alleged that the proposed regulatory features would amount to “mass surveillance and censorship capabilities”, the scope of which will be determined by the government that happens to be in power.
“We know from history that once in place, there will be an inevitable authoritarian expansion of the kind of content and people these technologies will be expected to surveil,” the statement said.
It went on to criticise the government’s recent AI push.
“Child safety looks like well-funded education, robust social services, and meaningful guardrails on the very AI technologies and platforms the current government is eagerly courting,” read the document.
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us…
— Signal (@signalapp) June 8, 2026
‘Kills internet privacy’
While many have welcomed Starmer’s proposal, highlighting the need to protect children from sexual abuse, others remain critical.
“Because each device must know if the user is a child to block the content, this policy guarantees the roll-out of mandatory digital ID checks for the entire population, effectively killing internet privacy and online anonymity for us all,” read a post by Labour Digital Rights Network, a UK-based advocacy group.
Cybersecurity researcher Steven Harris wrote a long post expressing his concerns about the recent proposal, calling it “sinister”.
“The bigger issue is that UK and European citizens clearly lack sufficient legal protections from the overreach of their own governments and the technocratic class who seem to increasingly regard internet freedom and digital privacy as a problem to be solved,” he said.
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