Apple’s new enhanced visual search raises privacy concerns

Ryan Haines / Android Authority
long story short
- Apple’s new enhanced photo visual search feature uses machine learning to identify things like landmarks.
- The service works by sharing encrypted data from your pictures with Apple and includes privacy protections.
- Some users are still concerned that Enhanced Visual Search is enabled by default, rather than being enabled by choice.
There are a million different ways to think about privacy, to evaluate the balance between how much privacy we want to give up versus what benefits we gain by doing so. With our devices and our increasing reliance on artificial intelligence tools like machine learning, it’s easy to draw a line when making such assessments between processes that occur entirely locally versus those that require data to be processed remotely, in the cloud. boundaries between. Currently, Apple users are sounding the alarm about the privacy implications of new enhanced visual search in photos and the data it presets to share with Apple.
Over the weekend, software engineer Jeff Johnson fueled the push by sharing his concerns about the new enhanced visual search options coming to iOS 18 and macOS 15 (via 91 mobile phone). The tool attempts to add value to your photos by identifying things like landmarks and matching their structural elements to a database compiled by Apple. Apple describes the feature and outlines its privacy practices as follows:
Enhanced visual search in photos lets you search photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately compares the locations in your photos to a global index maintained by Apple on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides the IP address. This prevents Apple from knowing the information in your photos.
While the company continues to provide instructions for turning off Enhanced Visual Search, Johnson is quick to point out that the service is enabled by default on iOS and macOS. This means that, unless you take active steps to the contrary, the information in the photos you take will end up being sent to Apple.
Now, before we start getting too paranoid, it’s clear that Apple is taking some legal steps to mitigate possible privacy implications. For example, the company’s mention of homomorphic encryption means it’s a system that allows Apple’s cloud servers to process your data while it’s still encrypted, rather than having to decrypt it first (and potentially exposing private location details) .
Even if we assume that the system works perfectly, some users are reluctant to use such a tool to transfer their data to the cloud. But what feels like a bigger offense may be the way it’s enabled by default for everyone, rather than requiring users to opt in.
If you’re not sure about Enhanced Visual Search and just want to turn it off, you can find the switch under Photos settings on iPhone or General settings on Mac.