Commissioner’s recommendations for tech companies include measures that have been criticised on privacy grounds.
Published On 6 Aug 2025
Australia’s internet watchdog has accused tech giants including Google and Apple of failing to take action against child sex abuse on their platforms.
In a report released on Wednesday, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said tech platforms were failing to implement various measures to protect children, including scanning cloud services for known abuse material and using language analysis tools to detect attempted sexual extortion in messaging services.
Grant said that Apple and YouTube, which is owned by Google, also failed to track reports of child sex abuse and could not say how long it took them to respond to the reports they received.
“It shows that when left to their own devices, these companies aren’t prioritising the protection of children and are seemingly turning a blind eye to crimes occurring on their services,” Grant said in a statement.
“We need to keep the pressure on the tech industry as a whole to live up to their responsibility to protect society’s most vulnerable members from the most egregious forms of harm and that’s what these periodic notices are designed to encourage.”
Grant added that the companies had taken few steps to improve their efforts since being asked three years ago, “despite the promise of AI to tackle these harms and overwhelming evidence that online child sexual exploitation is o