Last month Apple announced a new feature it was bringing to its devices that was aimed at curbing the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by detecting it before it was uploaded to the cloud.

The feature was meant to rollout as part of an update for Apple devices later this year but now the firm appears to have hit pause on its plans.

“Last month we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material,” Apple explained in a statement to The Verge.

“Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features,” the Cupertino-based firm added.

The first release Apple issued regarding CSAM detection was met with resistance but since then real concerns have been raised about the potential for this sort of detection to be abused.

While Apple has repeatedly said that it won’t allow governments to use CSAM detection for other purposes, some have argued that the very existence of the tool is problematic as its use may shift depending on the intentions of Apple and its partners.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in August, “All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts. That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change.”

Whether this is the end of Apple’s detection plans is unclear at this stage but given the backlash, we suspect that if CSAM detection makes it to a final OS release, it will be a very different system.