The government will legislate to make phones themselves block nude images for children
Apple and Google were given three months to volunteer. Ministers have read their answers and decided to write a law instead.
On 8 September 2026 Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, told the Commons that the government is“committing to introducing primary legislation to require major tech platforms to build in device-level protections for children”. That is a different lever from the under-16 ban. The ban tells apps who may hold an account; this would tell the phone or tablet itself what a child's camera and screen are allowed to do.
The legislation follows a deadline the government set in June, when it challenged industry on a three-month timeline to produce roadmaps for stopping children taking, sharing or viewing nude images on phones and tablets. Officials from Nandy's department and the Home Office then worked with Apple and Google directly. Both companies, she said, provided significant commitments and operating-system changes, including progress on “the blocking – not blurring – of nude imagery on underage devices”. Apple had already rolled out age assurance at the operating-system level earlier this year, tied to safety features that stop a child sending or receiving nude images on iMessage and FaceTime.
Her verdict on all of it was that the proposals “do not meet the scale of this crisis”. The figures she gave the House were that around 9,000 child sexual abuse offences each year involve an online element, that under-18s are the subject of almost a quarter of online blackmail, and that the Internet Watch Foundation believes 91% of the images concerned are taken by children themselves.
Two commitments came with the statement. The first is the device-level law, to be introduced “as soon as we can”, with an explicit get-out: if platforms build the technical fix while the work is ongoing, the government will reassess whether a law is needed at all. The second goes wider than hardware. Ministers will also require the apps children use to stop them reaching or sharing nudity, and are still working out what legislation that needs.
No date was given for either. Nandy's claim is that together they would make Britain the first country in the world to go this far.
Nothing changes on your child's phone this week, and there is no bill to read yet. The practical point is where the protection is heading: onto the device, underneath the apps, rather than depending on each app behaving. The settings that do a version of this today are already free and already on the phone in your hand, and our setup guides cover turning them on.