Insufficient moderation and age controls on Apple App Store leads to Grooming & Rape of a Child
Despite a supposedly strict but poorly thought out content controls on it’s App Store, Apple’s disregard for proper age validation and content moderation has led to at least three separate criminal cases of Child Abuse arising from the use of an app sold through Apples highly profitable App Store.
Cult of Mac reports on the latest criminal case involving Moses Virgil Campbell, a 44-year-old man, who used the “iDate-Personals Dating Service for Singles of Any Sex” app on his iPhone to groom, arrange to meet and eventually rape a 14 year old girl. The case follows a case in Canada involving Grindr (an App that received a marketing push from Stephen Fry and Jeremy Clarkson on the BBC TV show Top Gear) and another as yet unidentified iPhone social networking app in Phoenix.
Despite efforts from these services to market themselves as nothing more than flirtatious “games” exclusively for the use of adults aged 18+ a Washington Examiner interview with Tom Reed the President of the App maker (Netway) exposes the incompetent approach the company has taken to preventing grooming of minors: “the company looks for underage users by scanning profiles for words like “teen”. They also claim to review every uploaded picture to screen out “users who look like they’re too young to join”. The pedophile circumvented this weak effort by using a fake image and then simply sending his phone number through the site to the child.
