San Francisco demands Apple, Google remove 13 'nudify' apps

San Francisco's cease-and-desist letters mark an escalation in the city's battle against deepfake pornography. The city attorney's office previously pursued legal action against 16 deepfake websites, and this move targets the distribution infrastructure—the major app stores—that have enabled these apps to reach hundreds of millions of downloads. The letters are grounded in California law prohibiting services that create deepfake pornography and the documented harms: researchers from Cornell and Georgetown universities found that 70 percent of 155 face-swapping apps they tested could generate nude images, often without safety measures, despite appearing as benign tools.

Apple and Google have established developer policies prohibiting pornography and abuse, yet independent watchdog groups and academic researchers have repeatedly documented the persistence of nudification apps on their platforms. The Tech Transparency Project identified roughly 100 such apps across both stores in January and April of this year—described by its director as "just as bad, if not worse" than earlier findings. The fact that these companies take a financial cut through in-app payments creates a direct economic incentive to tolerate the apps, a detail the city attorney emphasized in his demand that they "stop profiting" from the technology. Google's immediate statement that it has already removed hundreds of such apps suggests the company may move to comply, though Apple's silence leaves uncertainty about its response.