Apple arrived to the AI party later than other smartphone makers, and its recent moves to catch up are causing a fair few controversies. While Apple Intelligence continues to invent fake news stories in its notification summaries, another controversy is brewing over a quietly released feature for identifying landmarks in photos.
It appears that Apple automatically opted users into Enhanced Visual Search with the release of iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 in October. The mechanism sends Images stored in the Photos application to Apple servers in order to identify places of interest.
(Image credit: Apple / Future)
Apple says the mechanism behind Enhanced Visual Search is end-to-end encrypted and that neither it nor its partner Cloudflare can see the photos or access any identifying information. Images are first analysed by a local machine-learning model to find possible “regions of interest”.
The model calculates a vector embedding to represent that part of the image and uses homomorphic encryption to scramble the contents (Apple explains this process on its website) before sending it to a remote server where computations are made to identify a matching landmark in a database.
But some users are unhappy about the way the feature was quietly implemented with no option to opt out. And even if you opt out now, data from existing photos has already been sent to Apple servers.
As reported by The Register, the software developer Michael Tsai wrote in his blog last week: “Apple is being thoughtful about doing this in a (theoretically) privacy-preserving way, but I don’t think the company is living up to its ideals here. Not only is it not opt-in, but you can’t effectively opt out if it starts uploading metadata about your photos before you even use the search feature. It does this even if you’ve already opted out of uploading your photos to iCloud.”
Jeff Johnson, another software developer, wrote: “It ought to be up to the individual user to decide their own tolerance for the risk of privacy violations. In this specific case, I have no tolerance for risk, because I simply have no interest in the Enhanced Visual Search feature, even if it happened to work flawlessly.”
Matthew Green, associate professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, wrote on the Hacker News forum: “This is not how you launch a privacy-preserving product if your intentions are good, this is how you slip something under the radar while everyone is distracted.”
The implementation does seem surprising considering how Apple has tried to make privacy a selling point. It even put up billboards with the line ‘What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone’. This isn’t just about privacy but respecting user preferences. Even if they data is encrypted as it claims, it seems wrong that the company is deciding that users will use new features by default without even communicating that they exist.
If you want to turn off Enhanced Visual Search, go to Settings > Apps > Photos on iOS / iPadOS or to Settings > General on a Mac and uncheck the box.
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