A nudify app called DreamFace — which, when tested by researchers, obligingly removed a woman's clothing from a photograph — was rated suitable for ages 9 and up in the Apple App Store. Nine. The same age rating you'd give a cartoon puzzle game about frogs. A child in third grade could download it without triggering a single parental control.
That fact should have ended someone's career. Instead, it became a footnote in a Tech Transparency Project report, one more line item in a spreadsheet of institutional neglect. Because Apple and Google don't just host these apps. They steer users toward them. When TTP typed "nudify" into the Google Play search box, Google's autocomplete helpfully suggested "nudie video apps." Three of TTP's App Store searches returned a nudify ad as the very first result — on a platform with a stated policy against promoting adult content. In total, the nudify apps found across both stores had been downloaded 483 million times and generated over $122 million in revenue. Apple and Google take a cut of every in-app purchase.
Meanwhile, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters to both companies demanding they remove face-swapping apps used to generate nonconsensual nude images of women and girls. Chiu says Apple and Google have likely "made millions of dollars in fees" from these apps. The letters accuse the companies of "aiding and abetting" the sale of explicit deepfake images. The companies' own developer policies already prohibit pornography, abuse, and harassment. They just don't enforce them when enforcement costs money.
The Girls Found Out Before the Adults Did
Here's where this stops being a tech regulation story and becomes an education story. At schools across the country, students have used these apps to create deepfake nude images of classmates, pulling source photos from yearbooks, social media, and other platforms. Multiple students and parents have described the traumatic experience of identifying their own faces in pornographic images. The responses from school administrators have often prioritized institutional protection over student safety.
At one high school in Iowa, four male students targeted multiple girls. The school's response was to notify parents with a warning not to discuss it. The girls, furious at being silenced, issued a joint public statement. They wrote that they "decided to write this statement so our voices can be heard and changes can be made, not just for us, but for all the girls coming after us." When they returned to school, no one checked on them. No one offered counseling.
A Stanford policy fellow, Riana Pfefferkorn, put it plainly: "When [deepfakes] happen, schools don't have a policy in place, they're taken by surprise. Educators and administrators may not even know about the existence of these sorts of 'nudify' apps." Surveys suggest between 40 and 50 percent of students are aware of deepfakes circulating at their school. The adults are the last to know. When they do find out, their instinct is to suppress it — protect the institution's name, not the kid in front of them.
Schools are now being advised to take student photos off their own websites. Experts have warned that yearbook-style images pose security risks, as photos can be scraped and run through nudify apps. Some schools have received demands for payment from those threatening to use such manipulated images. We've arrived at a point where posting a child's photo online is a security risk.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported significant increases in AI-generated child sexual abuse material, with case numbers rising dramatically in recent years. That is not a trend line. That is a detonation.
And through all of it, Apple's App Store kept rating the tools that make it possible as suitable for children, while Google's search bar kept finishing the sentence for anyone who started typing. San Francisco had to send a letter asking two of the richest companies on earth to stop profiting from the sexual abuse of minors. That letter should not have been necessary. The fact that it was tells you everything about whose safety these platforms are actually designed to protect.