Apple to scan public iCloud photos for 'harmful content,' report says

Apple plans to scan public iCloud photos and files for what it calls “harmful content,” according to a breaking report from Cointelegraph. The scanning is set to arrive with the company’s 27.3 updates. That’s the whole of what’s circulating right now — short, sharp, and light on the details people are already demanding.

The word “public” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. As reported, the focus is on publicly accessible iCloud content rather than private photo libraries. Cointelegraph’s post doesn’t say what counts as harmful, how the scanning would technically work, or which file types fall inside the net.

This isn’t Apple’s first brush with scanning user content. In 2021, the company announced a child safety system that would check iCloud Photos against a database of known child sexual abuse material on-device, then shelved it after a loud privacy backlash from researchers and users. Whether the new effort resembles that plan — or abandons it entirely — is unclear from the report.

The “27.3” label points to a future software cycle, but the report gives no release window, no list of affected regions, and no confirmation from Apple itself. The company hasn’t publicly detailed the feature, so treat the scope as unconfirmed until it does.

What happens next is mostly a waiting game: Apple watchers will look for language in upcoming beta builds, and privacy advocates will almost certainly have opinions the moment anything official lands. For now, the only sourced claim on the table is that public iCloud content is in the crosshairs.