Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

Our guest today is Jane Horvath, Apple's chief privacy officer.

She's here to discuss Apple's new measures to combat the spread of child pornography, now typically

called child sexual abuse material, or CSAM.

Apple announced its intention to place these features in its next operating system, iOS 15,

a couple weeks ago. The plan is attracting a lot of scrutiny and sparking debate in the privacy

community, in the broader tech world, and beyond. It is also reportedly spurring quite a bit of

internal discussion over at Apple itself. It's not surprising that the plan is attracting a lot of

attention since it sits at the intersection of at least three important issues.

First, a pressing moral and social problem, the scourge of child sexual exploitation.

Second, a widely held and strongly defended, but sometimes elusive value, privacy.

And third, a major civilizational trend, technological progress.

Here meaning some big, bold advances that Apple says enable its new features.

There are three features that Apple is introducing. One of them is new search guidance

centered around child sexual abuse material. In a nutshell,

Apple will be providing resources to those who use search or Siri to ask how to report CSAM,

and I believe it's warnings or guidance to those who seem to be seeking CSAM. I don't think

this feature has sparked much, if any, controversy.

The other two features are going to be our focus today. Jane is going to talk about them in

detail, so I will only provide a brief introduction. There's a messaging feature, which will

seek to flag sexually explicit images sent to or from children's

...