In a video my friend’s dog is laying on her back, her little paws in the air, while my friend rubs the dog’s chest. You can see most of the dog — who I’m not naming for very important privacy reasons — from her head to her belly. On closer inspection, you’ll notice the picture includes some dog nipples.
Apple’s iMessage thought this video was so inappropriate that it flagged the video as potentially containing nudity and blurred it. When someone else received the video over iMessage, the app displayed the message “This may be sensitive.” They had to purposefully tap to reveal the video of a dog laying on her back being petted.
This, obviously, is not the intended use case for iMessage’s nudity detection features. They are designed to let people protect themselves against receiving unwanted or unsolicited nude photos and videos. But the case of my friend’s dog shows how this feature can sometimes misclassify videos.
“Sensitive Content Warning lets you receive warnings about photos or videos that might contain nudity before viewing them,” Apple’s website reads. Apple introduced the feature in iOS 17 a few years ago. Obviously, scanning the content of messages and content is controversial, but Apple says it performs the scan on the device. Users can also turn the feature off in the settings. “Sensitive Content Warning uses on-device machine learning to analyze photos and videos. Because they’re analyzed on your device, Apple doesn’t receive an indication that nudity was detected and doesn’t get access to the photos or videos as a result,” its website adds.
The dog video isn’t an isolated incident either. Here’s another I found on an Apple forum from May 2025: “Why did a photo of my dog trigger a sensitive content warning on iMessage?” the title reads.
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Have you come across similar issues? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
“So I was going to send 3 photos to a group chat I had on iMessage. After I pressed the send button, I got a sensitive content warning… the photo was one of my dog’s body, the other two were fine though. I’m confused and I wanted to report this problem. Just so you all know I’m just looking to report this problem. I think it was just a false and mistaken sensitive content warning,” the poster wrote.
There is also this one from October 2024: “A picture of a deer was flagged as sensetive [sic].”
“This was flagged as possibly sensitive, and a pop-up appeared asking me If I wanted to send it. That is a picture of a deer from a trail camera,” the poster wrote.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
