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Apple's iOS 18 'Enhanced Visual Search' Shares Photo Data by Default, Raises Privacy Concerns, Says Jeff Johnson

Dec 30, 2024, 10:00 AM

Apple's latest iOS 18 update includes a feature called 'Enhanced Visual Search' that is enabled by default, allowing iPhones to share data from users' photos with Apple to identify landmarks. This feature, an expansion of the older 'Visual Look Up' tool, processes photos using an on-device machine learning model to detect regions of interest, such as landmarks, and then sends encrypted vector embeddings to Apple's servers for matching against a global database. The process is designed to protect user privacy through techniques like homomorphic encryption and differential privacy. However, the automatic activation of this feature without explicit user consent has raised privacy concerns among users and developers, including Jeff Johnson, prompting calls for Apple to make it an opt-in feature. Users can disable 'Enhanced Visual Search' in the Photos settings on their iPhones or Macs running iOS 18 or macOS Sequoia.