If you're someone who values privacy, you may want to pay attention to a recent discovery about one of Apple’s photo features.
“Enhanced Visual Search” toggle in the Apple Photos app might be collecting data from your photos without your consent.
When you enable Enhanced Visual Search, your device uses machine learning to detect regions of interest in your photos, such as landmarks.
If you’re someone who values privacy, you may want to pay attention to a recent discovery about one of Apple’s photo features: “Enhanced Visual Search” toggle in the Apple Photos app might be collecting data from your photos without your consent. Here’s what you need to know about this feature and how it works.
The Enhanced Visual Search feature, which is switched on by default, allows your device to share data from your photos with Apple. It’s designed to help you search for landmarks in your photos. For example, if you take a picture of a building, you can swipe up on the image and select “Look Up Landmark” to see if it can identify the structure.
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While this might sound like a helpful feature, it requires your photos to be analysed by Apple’s systems. When you enable Enhanced Visual Search, your device uses machine learning to detect regions of interest in your photos, such as landmarks. If a landmark is found, the data is turned into an encrypted vector embedding, which is then sent to Apple to compare with its global database, as reported by The Verge.
The key issue is that the feature is turned on by default, meaning users must actively go into the settings to disable it.
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If you’re worried about your privacy, you can easily find the Enhanced Visual Search toggle in the Photos settings on your iPhone or Mac. Just head to the iOS Settings app, and you’ll be able to turn it off if you don’t want your photos analysed by Apple.
While Apple has worked to ensure privacy through encryption, making this feature opt-in would have been a better choice for user control. If you prefer to keep your photo data private, it’s worth checking your settings and disabling this feature.
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Ayushi Jain
Tech news writer by day, BGMI player by night. Combining my passion for tech and gaming to bring you the latest in both worlds. View Full Profile
