- Apple’s new Enhanced Visual Search in Photos uses machine learning to recognize things like landmarks.
- The service works by sharing encrypted data from your pictures with Apple, and includes privacy safeguards.
- Some users are still concerned that Enhanced Visual Search is enabled by default, rather than having you opt in.
There are a million different ways to think about privacy, evaluating the balance between how much of it we want to cede, and what benefits we get for doing so. With our devices, and our increasing reliance on AI tools like machine learning, a convenient line to draw when making such evaluations is that between processes that occur fully locally, and those that require working on data remotely in the cloud. Right now, Apple users are raising the alarm about the privacy implications of the new Enhanced Visual Search in Photos, and the data it shares with Apple by default.
Over the weekend, software engineer Jeff Johnson got this ball rolling by sharing his concerns about the presence of a new Enhanced Visual Search option that appears in both iOS 18 and on macOS 15 (via 91mobiles). The tool attempts to add value to your photos by identifying stuff like landmarks, matching elements of their construction with a database Apple’s compiled. Apple describes the feature and outlines its privacy practices as such: