r/privacy • u/lo________________ol • 7d ago
Apple opts everyone into having their Photos analyzed by AI news
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/03/apple_enhanced_visual_search/160
u/CortaCircuit 6d ago
Opt-in by default should be illegal.
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u/superconcepts 6d ago
Opt in after an update when you previously opted out should be doubly illegal.
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u/gromain 6d ago
Pretty sure this actually is illegal in Europe.
GDPR should protect against that shit since you already have withdrawn (or more accurately not given) your consent, so the Corp can't play the card "oh we didn't know".
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u/Roo1996 6d ago edited 6d ago
Correct. There are several valid legal bases to process personal data under GDPR.
One of them is consent (I don't think any other ones would be relevant in this case).
Consent has to be explicit (i.e., cannot be bundled into terms and conditions) and freely given. Unless providing certain data is necessary for the provision of a service, the provision of the service cannot be conditional on the customer's consent (or else it would not be freely given).
That said, there are too many factors to make sweeping legal statements. In this case, I would imagine Apple is doing something to anonymise data to an extent.
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u/Jumping-Gazelle 7d ago
so done with this "always connected" stuff.
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u/usmclvsop 7d ago
Worse is that even with icloud completely disabled it’s still sending you photo information to the cloud without even asking
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u/One_Firefighter336 7d ago
I just had this happen to me.
iCloud full. Ok, let’s delete stuff. Freed up over 1.5G , logged out. Oops, forgot to check something log right back in. iCloud full. FROM WHERE WTF?!
(Yes all iCloud settings off on all devices, none logged in)
Some shady shit going on methinks…
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u/notjordansime 7d ago
Did you also clear your recently deleted folder? If not, it’ll be there for 30 days, still taking up space. Had it happen to me before.
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u/One_Firefighter336 5d ago
Thank you u/notjordansime for your advice, it worked.
Please take my humble upvote. ☝️
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u/soogoush 7d ago
Seriously, I'm more and more going back in term of tech even though I love new technologies. Went back to iPod for music, home server for files and photos even though I still use iCloud.
Guess the next step is and "almost" dumb phone
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u/Dontpayyourtaxes 7d ago edited 7d ago
Make change, take action, tell others and help them.
I used ADB and 100% degoogled my phone, I swapped out all the stock android apps for private opensource alts. I don't have any accounts on my phone. Never signed into email or anything. I also removed functionality for NFC, finger print scanning, and facial recognition. I have a toggle that disables all sensors.
I am walking around not sharing shit with the data brokers. I have a separate device for interacting with corporate world, it is walled off from everything else.
Also, syncthing can replace much of the functionality google offers with cloud/docs/pics. And KDEconnect is an air mouse/remote touchpad which is super awesome too. It will let you text from pc and can share all notifications and such.
We are opting in on data brokers and this invasion of privacy by accepting the terms of use. What I have expressed is a way to refuse those terms. I buy tech with a privacy requirement. Stock android or apple would be unacceptable as I believe proprietary accounts for the ability to use a device means that I do not have any control of it. I am not spending money on that.
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u/samudrin 7d ago
Any good guides on doing this?
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u/Dontpayyourtaxes 6d ago
first you need a device to tinker with. I have found some brands will not allow degoogle, I was given a samsung s8 and it wouldn't let me wash it completely. You can search for degoogle "phone model" and see what it takes for that model.
If you are going to need a new phone to do it, then you may also want to look into alt android forks that are already google free. changing OS is going to be a little easier then going through the list of installed packages in ADB, looking up what they are, and purging what you don't want.
That drawer of old phones is great for playing with ABD.
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u/Controls_Man 7d ago
I guess... For all of this effort you are going through to sanitize a smart phone, including not even using applications, why not just buy a tracphone with a prepaid card?
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u/csonka 6d ago
I’m guessing the trade off for privacy and control is a lot of your time and effort to manage this yourself and not being able to interact with genpop as easily (incidental friction).. is that right?
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u/Dontpayyourtaxes 6d ago edited 6d ago
guess again, I spend time reading about privacy things, but I don't spend time managing anything. My phone has been the same set up for like 5 years. It works just as well now as it did 5 years ago. And, if I lost my phone no one is getting any info on my accounts.
"not being able to interact with genpop as easily" I don't even know what you are on about with this, do you think google is the key to your social life? I know of the people around me, my phone is the longest running set up. And, I pay a lot less than everyone I know. $130 on the phone 5-6 years ago and $200/yr for service.
Oh, did you know that when you remove all the carrier control of a device you can do things like use your hotspot without a separate data cap, or if you use youtube in a browser in desktop mode it has the same functionality as the $20/mo premium subscription?
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u/TheAngryShitter 6d ago
What is ADB?
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u/Rickie_Spanish 6d ago
Android debug bridge. It's a tool for app developers to debug their applications during development. Its also got a ton useful commands non developers can use as well.
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u/asEszNpjCg2KD559 7d ago
Yet another hardening tactic I will add to a growing list of 'first things to disable when I boot into iOS for the first time'.
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago
Can you enable these things before signing in? It's been a while since I've touched an iOS device
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u/Dontpayyourtaxes 7d ago
I was thinking, with an android phone you could go in through terminal and ADB and clean up the trash before getting faced with the sign into google wall.
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago
On Android, at least, you can skip signing in entirely. I haven't signed into an Android device for years now. I would be curious about what happens differently if you disable the Google app, though.
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u/Dontpayyourtaxes 7d ago
I went through the list of packages on mine and got rid of all the google. My phone doesn't prompt for any kind of sign in at all. I have had this set up for like 5 years or more now. I am glad to hear there is an opt out for it for others that might not be so savvy to purge that shit.
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u/xquarx 7d ago
Look at it this way, it's a slippery slope Apple is on, and we can see which direction they are sliding. Why give them more chances to screw us? It's like the manipulative ex, it doesn't get better from here onwards.
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u/Travel-Barry 7d ago
I’m generally quite content with the level of privacy Apple offers when compared to its competitors. There’s always going to be a sacrifice for some level of convenience.
But one thing that fucks me off, to the extent that it makes me close to going full GraffeenOhEs, is how certain settings seem to just re-enable themselves after OS updates. Or sporadically after logging into iCloud via a computer browser or something.
The most random, unrelated event will (for example) re-enable my disabled Game Center iCloud preferences. Or my Siri and Safari cloud history.
I want all that local, not in the cloud, but Apple just flicks these on sporadically and hopes that I don’t check my iCloud settings every now and then.
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u/MasterRaceLordGaben 7d ago
https://gizmodo.com/apple-agrees-to-95-million-settlement-in-siri-eavesdropping-lawsuit-2000544806
It's OK, inevitably you will get 10 cents from this feature too. When eventually they make an "oops" and send the photos regardless of your settings.
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u/TheAngryShitter 6d ago
Why did you spell greffeenOhEs like that?
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u/PomegranateSignal882 6d ago
Because spelling it properly summons the creator, who's a highly confrontational autistic schizo with zero social awareness. Which is an excellent combination for creating a private operating system, but not so great for having a conversation with
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u/TheAngryShitter 6d ago
Hahaha WHAT?? How does it summon him? Wouldn't you have to tag his reddit user name?
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u/just_an_undergrad 6d ago
There are many ways to have the internet crawl for mentions of something that don’t involve Reddit’s baked-in methods.
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u/TheAngryShitter 4d ago
Now that I understand what you're talking about. That makes this comment fucking amazing
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u/Alternative-Walk9643 7d ago
So, basically, just about the same as its competitors.
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u/Travel-Barry 7d ago
Well I don’t know if iOS tracks your taps and swipes to the same extent stock Android appears to.
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago
Most research I've read points to Apple being not as bad as, or occasionally on par with, Google. Still bad, obviously. But if you don't plan to install a new OS on top of your phone (or at least try fiddling around with app disablers) then Apple probably provides the better option, providing you do try mitigating their default settings.
"Android phones collect more data by volume, but iPhones collect more types of data, a study finds"
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u/Dontpayyourtaxes 7d ago
synchthing does all this local, just a folder share/sync you have total control of. I have my degoogled phone set to sync the photos and docs folders with the same on my linux desktop. No account to make, works great. Same convenience as google docs and pictures but local and no big brother bs account.
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u/SjayL 7d ago
Apple just flicks these on sporadically and hopes that I don’t check my iCloud settings every now and then.
I fucking hate this, but the reason that they do this is to save non technical idiots who fuck something up and can’t figure out how to fix it. Some people are so non technical that they don’t even know how to define what problem they are having. These people far far outnumber competent users, much less competent users who place a premium on privacy.
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u/code_munkee 7d ago
I agree 100% on that.
What they are doing here seems pretty secure from violating privacy, but I definitely don't like that they did it without asking.
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u/mattmaintenance 6d ago
Have fun analyzing my 19GB collection of dick pics.
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u/jisuskraist 5d ago
funny thing, it doesn’t know is a dick pick. unless apple has a vector database of dick picks 🤔
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u/darioblaze 7d ago
ngl I go through the settings in the beta to see what they turn back on and they turn this and analytics back on every update (00.0) and you manually have to turn it off
Oh and sooooooooooooooooo many Apple apps transmit info they shouldn’t be collecting. TestFlight, Apple’s app to test apps, collects your contact info with no way to turn it off, every time. Several apps do this.
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u/ThisIsPaulDaily 7d ago
" You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General." - The article
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago
FYI, you are quoting Apple and incorrectly attributing it to the article.
It's typical PR speak to universally enable an invasive feature, and then say "anybody can disable it" somewhere else in a much more obscure place.
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u/Suck_My_Thick 7d ago
Not an apple fan, but where would you recommend putting it?
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago
Preferably, in a dialog box after the app updates. That's what Google did after they added a bunch of incredibly invasive advertisement stuff into Chrome recently. (And if you install Chrome fresh, it still pops up.)
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u/7heblackwolf 6d ago
Ok, at this point you just sound like a Karen...
Jobs introduced the three-clicks away long long time ago.
Literally this privacy "concerning" setting is 3 clicks away.
In windows for example you literally cannot disable Recall feature which is taking snapshots of whatever the f you're doing, or you cannot fully disable telemetry at all.
While I'm one of those that will likely disable it, for most common folks it's not a big deal and thel will probably enjoy the feature related, such as creating memories based on relevant contextual data or grouping photos (which WAS A THING EVEN BEFORE AI, this will just improve that locally).
So yeah, I think you're being a bit paranoid tbh. This is not one of the grounbreaking news in privacy, you're just trying to make it sound as it is.
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u/Hooked__On__Chronics 7d ago
To be fair, Apple didn’t make it obscure if that’s where it is (settings > apps > photos)
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u/therapist122 7d ago
It’s obscure as fuck. That setting is at the bottom and the words at a glance don’t indicate anything about the fact it’s sending your photo data to AI. It literally says “Enhanced Visual Search”. That is such a misleading term
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u/Hooked__On__Chronics 6d ago
Dude, it's not obscure. It's where you can reliably expect the setting to exist on an Apple device for any of their apps.
And I'm sort of with you on them not being explicit about it, but only a little. It says that the device "match[es] places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple". It says it right fucking there.
And they put the "Photos & Privacy" button right underneath that for you if you want to see more. In there, it says "Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers." Again, right fucking there, except you do have to click the feared blue text to get to it. Does the fact that it doesn't say "AI" change that much for you? I would want that shit turned off regardless.
I stated in another comment, I'm against the opt-out nature of this type of shit. But it's certainly not obscure. I think companies like Meta and Google have shown us what obscure really is. Does that mean I think it should be opt-out? Of course not.
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u/Technoist 7d ago
Thanks! Turned it off. No idea why anyone would want/need to have this.
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u/SenorSplashdamage 7d ago
My guess is that it might be tied to features for being able to search your own photos more semantically. I find it really irritating as I would like to be able to search “cats with gadgets” to find specific cat memes in my folders without having to share my private images for the company to train their algorithms.
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago
Ente allows you to tag your photos using on-device machine learning, and doesn't need to send some subset of your photos to their servers to handle this, it just works. (When it's done, it can synchronize the tags it has identified with full E2EE. No homomorphic shenanigans.)
If it felt compelled, Apple could probably do this too.
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u/Technoist 7d ago
I have not found anything about it having to do with identifying people or pets, etc. Do you have a source for that? From what I have found it seems to be only for identifying "places", i.e. landmarks such as buildings, towers etc. I already have locations metadata enabled so I already have the location of where the photo was taken, don't need to sync any data with a database of known buildings, encrypted or not.
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u/I_Want_To_Grow_420 7d ago
To easily search photos. I understand the privacy risks but can see the positives as well. My grandmother is a wreath maker. She has thousand of photos of her wreaths and others for ideas. She can search "black orange wreath with spiders" and it will find all of the wreaths that are black and orange and feature spiders.
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u/Technoist 7d ago
Hmm, I have been able to search for detailed objects by text in my photos for years. As I understand it, this thing is about recognizing places (buildings etc) and not persons, pets, objects.
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u/I_Want_To_Grow_420 7d ago
Yeah, same thing, just updated. Now if it sees a mountain, it can guess if it's Mt. Kilimanjaro or a different mountain.
As you said, it's been around for years, so it's strange that people are just now getting upset about it. Any time is better than never though.
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u/neon5k 7d ago
Is in on device ai? I have icloud photos backup off. Will ot still send my images to their cloud to do ai stuff?
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u/Exact_Recording4039 7d ago
“Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos.”
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u/TimeGrownOld 7d ago
Interesting they use homomorphic encryption... if you wanted to make a feature like this while keeping privacy, that would be the way to do it.
Still, I thought homomorphic encryption was a long way away before hitting the prime time.
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 6d ago
In the quick research I did on it today, it seems not without its flaws.
Apparently several aspects of it fail to meet traditional standards for secure encryption, for one thing.
Neither do I understand how being able to search an encrypted file for something without either decrypting it or even having the decryption key for that file improves the privacy of anyone.
If Apple or anyone else can look for evidence of [body part] in some "encrypted" blob and the search comes back "Body part found", how is that preserving anyone's privacy??
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago
It sends things to Apple regardless of whether you have iCloud backups turned off. That's what makes this particularly insidious: They added a new checkbox you need to find and disable.
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u/jumpyHR 7d ago
Does this apply to older iPhones still on iOS 17?
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 6d ago
Looks like it's an iOS 18 feature.
I recently migrated an iPhone running iOS 17 to a newer model running iOS 18 and it's in the new one, not the old one, and it's on by default.
Ugh.
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u/ThisIsPaulDaily 7d ago
That said, I do think people should read it in full. It outlines how the feature works to keep information encrypted the whole time.
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u/FuriousRageSE 7d ago
Is it the same people that promissed that deleted images was deleted and unable to restore deleted images? :)
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u/spoonybends 7d ago
I hope everyone reads the article. According to all the experts asked, Apple is (at least according to how they’ve said it works) keeping everything encrypted and unidentifiable every step of the way. Their failure comes from Apple uncharacteristically not letting you know that your data is being sent out in the first place, however “safe” it is.
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u/CountGeoffrey 6d ago
agreed 100%. apple made a conscious decision to accept the short term backlash that they knew would come from this (they had to know they aren't dummies) with an understanding the fervor would die down within weeks if not days. and then the 95% normie population will just enjoy this new feature by default. i wonder what percent of apple users use icloud photo services today.
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u/fin2red 7d ago edited 7d ago
This, and Windows Recall, will make it very easy for EU to implement ChatControl, which they've been trying to push so hard to get approved.
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u/xquarx 7d ago
We are boling frogs, one small step at the time. For people reading this, here is your sign: JUMP. There are alternatives to everything inside your nice warm cozy pot.
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u/Danni_Les 6d ago
I've stopped using an iphone because after every fucking update, all my privacy settings has been changed to allow the devious cunts to whatever they see fit - it was no longer a phone that worked for me, but was working against me, and would drive me nuts.
Glad I moved away from these phones because the siri lawsuit is going on too - it's been listening to and recording your conversations for YEARS.
I use a flip phone (non-smart phone), in this day and age, and everyone around me actually flips out. Pun intended.
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u/chilloutpal 6d ago
where did you find one!? in the market for a nokia-never-dies myself lol
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u/Danni_Les 6d ago
It's an old one I had to dig up - sony ericsson s700, a swivel phone, and have another backup, the w800 (or w810?) also from sony ericsson.
Found someone on reddit who has one of the w800
ebay seems to have a lot of them on sale with varying prices.
I might upgrade at some point and get a 3g version of one of the old phones, but for now, calls and texts work great, and the battery lasts 2-3 days on one charge.
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u/blacksan00 6d ago
AI detect kid porn - sends alerts to Apple - parents taking pictures of their kids having fun in a bath are arrested. This will be the next things we see on the news and another $95M fine.
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u/DavidXGA 7d ago
I know everyone loves a good Apple hate-wank, but I'm going to be optimistic about my downvotes and post some detail of how this actually works:
- Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash).
- Differential privacy: a decent amount of noise is added the the vector before sending it. Enough to make it impossible to reverse lookup the vector. The noise level here is ε = 0.8, which is quite good privacy.
- OHTTP relay: it's sent through a 3rd party so Apple never knows your IP address. The contents are encrypted so the 3rd party never doesn't learn anything either (some risk of exposing "IP X is an apple photos user", but nothing about the content of the library).
- Homomorphic encryption: The lookup work is performed on server with encrypted data. Apple can't decrypt the vector contents, or response contents. Only the client can decrypt the result of the lookup.
It's not true that the only way preserve computing privacy is to not send any data off-device. Apple has done a good job here, for a feature that necessarily requires a dataset which would not fit on your phone.
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u/ScoopDat 6d ago
That's great and all, but can you demonstrate that's what's actually happening?
We understand that's what ought to happen, but then we get nonsense like this. We can't eval what's going on serverside, and since none of their software is open source, we can't confirm any of that's properly happening on our end either. I can't understand how any of these claims are anything aside from 'trustmebro'.
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago edited 7d ago
Apple made a huge blunder by failing to ask for consent before sending hashed image data to their corporate clouds. And I don't find these half measures to be much besides smoke and mirrors.
- Smoke: differential privacy is not battle-tested, let alone "impossible to reverse" as you say. [PDF]
- Mirrors: the OHTTP "third party" is Cloudflare, contracted by Apple. Cloudflare is a surveillance giant of its own.
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u/YeetBoiPrime 7d ago
A lot of you are falling for a clickbaity article without understanding how this works. Your photo data is still encrypted when apple is seeing it, thats what “homomorphic encryption” allows. You can perform specific tasks against a specific type of encrypted data that alters the data (in this case gives you information about photo content) without ever having to see the photo.
I disagree about having it turned on automatically, but most people already use the icloud photo search thing and this is a better and more private way of doing that.
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u/planedrop 6d ago
Article isn't even that clickbaity to be honest, the headline of the post is though.
People don't read stuff anymore though, they just see a post and go UPVOTE and run with it.
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u/igmyeongui 7d ago
Just read the whole TOS and this is the correct answer. This post, all the reactions and the clickbait title is the smoke and mirrors. Again Apple was able to provide a feature to enhance your experience and it’s not a the cost of your privacy. Still people here will never be happy no matter how encrypted your shit is.
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u/CountGeoffrey 7d ago
there's an anti-Apple narrative that is very strong on /r/privacy
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u/hyperion-0 6d ago
for the sake of argument, let's assume that apple can't see what happens server side due to the encryption outlined.
the process still results in all photos on your device being sent to a server which results in the photos on your device then being appended with a tag.
apple controls the hardware and the OS on the phone. they dont need to see what happens encrypted on the server since they can observe the result on the device.
theoretically, apple could create a server side database of anything to return additional tags (potentially hidden tags). what would then prevent the OS from phoning home if an image matched a database of tags stored on the device?
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u/Smarty-Pants65 7d ago
and how do we opt out?
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u/ChronoTrader 7d ago
IOS - Settings>apps>photos>turn off “enhanced visual search” located at the bottom of the page
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u/Spud_Mayhem 7d ago
I want a setting that says new features and options won’t be enabled unless I review and agree first to each change. It is exhausting keeping up with Apple changing iOS settings during updates. I don’t use public cloud options for anything except what i can’t disable and I diligently reviewed and shutoff all non-core options on my iOS phone (screw the bells and whistle “convenience” options). But as the article stated, I found “enhanced visual search” enabled in photos and shut it off. Grrrrr!
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u/Altruistic-Kiwi9496 7d ago
Gotta love how Apple is always one step ahead of the competition. They are such progressive thinkers!
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u/SquidFistHK 7d ago
You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General.
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u/rorowhat 7d ago
Apple's privacy is all smoke and mirrors
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u/cookiesnooper 7d ago
"We don't share any of your data with 3rd parties.*" *but we do have access to literally everything you interacted with using our devices
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago
Ironically, Apple is proud of using "OHTTP privacy" in this service - OHTTP is literally a Cloudflare proxy server contracted by Apple. That's one hell of a third party.
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u/onan 7d ago
The way they use Cloudflare is to separate out knowledge of your IP address from knowledge of your request. "iCloud Private Relay is designed to protect your privacy by ensuring that when you browse the web in Safari, no single party — not even Apple — can see both who you are and what sites you're visiting."
Cloudflare sees your source address (for obvious reasons) but cannot see anything about the contents of your request. Apple sees (some) information about your request, but has no idea where it came from.
The goals here are that:
1) there is no way to get all the information about one request, and
2) there is no way to correlate any one request with any others.
This is obviously not a panacea for all privacy concerns, but it is a substantial additional layer of anonymization. It absolutely is not "we use Cloudflare, so now they see everything."
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u/looseleaffanatic 7d ago
This. Appleeaters try to flex on droids when the reality is they are both just invasive devices.
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u/londonc4ll1ng 7d ago
Boss move byApple, the privacy company. Privacy my ass, this is just the CSAM coming back with a vengance. It did not work first time, we will get our foot into the door now with a small 'thing' and then expand as we go.
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u/clrksml 7d ago
"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," observed software developer Michael Tsai in an analysis shared Wednesday. "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."
Tsai argues Apple's approach is even less private than its abandoned CSAM scanning plan "because it applies to non-iCloud photos and uploads information about all photos, not just ones with suspicious neural hashes."
Pretty bullshit this applies to all photos not just the ones upload to iCloud. I don't fuck with
Reasons to self host
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u/onan 6d ago
I will definitely never argue against self-hosting things, it's often a great tool. But the particular reasons you cite here don't seem to cohere into much:
Apple flagging photos
This is a thing that they never actually did. They published a whitepaper about how a CSAM-detection system could work in order to gather feedback, the feedback was negative, so they didn't do it.
iCloud hack
Some celebrities had their passwords guessed. That doesn't seem to have much to do with the hosting provider, and is even less significant these days given the increased commonness of 2FA.
FBI access.
Any company is going to comply with the law. (And that's very much better than the alternative; while some places will have some shitty laws, having corporations be above the law is definitely not an improvement.)
But apple is the only large company that has invested significant resources into making things E2EE, so that they usually won't have access to any of your data to turn over.
Given that your examples are 3-11 years old, and in one case so old that the link doesn't work anymore, this feels less like a relevant response to this story and more like a grudge list that you carry around and paste into a comment any time apple is mentioned.
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u/Crafty_Programmer 6d ago
While it's not great that the feature is opt-out instead of opt-in, this appears to be a QOL feature instead of something to help law enforcement. It also isn't uploading your files to iCloud. It's meant for tagging things like landmarks. According to the article, the processing of your files happens on your device, and then is securely and privately compared with a database of hashes on Apple's servers (the claim is that they don't learn more about the content if your image, and that they can't tell which device or IP address the request came from).
I'm pointing all this out because the article is kind of jumbled, and some of the quotes taken from the article might suggest that this is Apple's CSAM scanner come back to life. There is no indication that this is true. The could be secretly doing that too, or may have plans to bring it back as an extension of this feature, but presently, this is not known to be happening.
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u/ReputationTTPD1989 7d ago
Oh noo, please don’t train your AI models on my ludicrous amount of penis photos. Might cock Image Playground up more than it already is!
In all seriousness, disgusting behavior. You can invade my privacy if you have a banging product. The only thing banging in iOS 18 is my head against the wall.
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u/iSeize 6d ago
Quite certain my Google photos are doing the exact same thing
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u/CountGeoffrey 6d ago
they are not. google doesn't use FHE or differential privacy or OHTTP for image processing. Google deals with the actual photo and actually invades your privacy. While this feature by Apple is private to you.
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u/amygeek 6d ago edited 6d ago
This is a little misleading when they say the photos are being uploaded, if Apple’s tech details are accurate (I don’t trust them 100% but I trust them way more than Google or Meta or Twitter).
The photos themselves don’t leave the device. Encrypted info about the contents of the photo is sent to the cloud. They look for a match of the encrypted data, which appears to be garbage to humans. That info itself is not the photo & they say that it cannot be associated back to you.
Opt in by default & not explaining in a clear way the value and risks of enabling the feature is crappy. But par for the course for big tech as they look at low opt in numbers & want to avoid that (because this feature will provide so much delight to customers! or will provide valuable info to the company! or justify jobs! etc)
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u/gesumejjet 6d ago
With this and the Siri eavesdropping thing, the Apple being good for privacy lie is finally shattered.
It's too bad that people will probably still be touting that bullshit because the propaganda has already been done
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u/Arish78 6d ago
How to disable this setting:
https://www.macworld.com/article/2567181/ios-18-enhanced-visual-search-privacy-setting-how-to.html
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u/Gray10111 4d ago
Glad I spotted this thread. I am in the UK so would have thought it wouldn’t have fallen part of the automatic opt-in, but having just checked my phone it was enabled. Now it’s not!
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u/Johnny_Fuckface 3d ago
Tip: If your iPhone is less than a 15 it won't be there even if you update past v18.1
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u/thatwannabe29 3d ago
Encryption or not, it’s still not okay as I never consented to them using my data for their machine learning model. That’s my data and they have no right to steal it without informed consent prior to
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u/MSA966 7d ago
The solution is to have two phones, one connected to the Internet and the other not.
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u/Dontpayyourtaxes 7d ago
No, people should move away from using the internet on phones an general. Keep the phone clean and have a PC with VPN/adblock/private DNS,agent spoofing, containers, ublock, ..... Where you have control of your privacy easier.
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u/empeirotexnhths 7d ago
Or an old school camera?
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u/lo________________ol 7d ago
Considering how trashy modern cell phone cameras seem to be (Samsung got caught faking photos of the moon by applying a generative AI "Moon" filter to images it thinks are of the moon, and it applies similar enhancements to other photos), a DSLR might be a worthwhile investment.
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u/Charming_Science_360 7d ago
Apple opts everyone into having their Photos analyzed by AI
Not everyone.
Only those who use Apple products.
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u/doggadooo57 7d ago
As frustrating as having a privacy related setting turned on by default, Apple implemented this feature way better than any other company. iphones with this feature use “ homomorphic-encryption, a form of cryptography that enables computation on encrypted data” - so iphone encryps data before sending it to apple servers. their servers also have no idea where the data came from. tbh this is much more private than posting a photo somewhere.
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u/ndilegid 7d ago
As a user I don’t want that ecological disaster to be done in my name. I don’t consent to this.
We have a handful of years, less than you think, before the dangerous tipping points hit. We can’t be so reckless.
UN Environmental Program: link
The proliferating data centres that house AI servers produce electronic waste. They are large consumers of water, which is becoming scarce in many places. They rely on critical minerals and rare elements, which are often mined unsustainably. And they use massive amounts of electricity, spurring the emission of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
We are in range of 5 tipping points today.
With current global warming levels, we are already within the uncertainty range for 5 tipping points. The Paris Agreement’s target range of 1.5-2॰C of warming still puts us at risk of crossing 6 or more tipping points, including ice sheet collapse and widespread permafrost thaw.
A goal of 2C is a goal to cross all of the tipping points. Is it worth this toy we are so obsessed with? Food & water folks. Fight for a future
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u/versking 7d ago
It should definitely be opt-in, but to help with threat assessment, the article says
If it all works as claimed, and there are no side-channels or other leaks, Apple can't see what's in your photos, neither the image data nor the looked-up label.
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u/Gravexmind 7d ago
Just turned it off, but not confident that it truly means anything or that my settings stop them from doing it anyways.
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u/Disastrous-Star-5917 5d ago
No way. Not Apple. Omg, not Apple. The only and truly privacy first company. They do no wrong! Haha
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u/Stilgar314 7d ago
Opt-in by default to make sure every clueless user will never take the steps to shut it down. Typical shitty corpo movement, so common that I'll use it as a reminder to check all my privacy options in every service.