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You start to notice stories popping up in your Facebook feed (assuming you’re old enough to always use it) to stop Apple to automatically choose to have all your photos analyzed by AI?
Well, I have. It reminds me a bit of the popular scam trend that had a resurgence in 2024, where people published a statement that deny Facebook the right to access his pictures. It usually says something like “I do not authorize META, Facebook or any entity associated with Facebook to use my photos, information, messages or posts, past or future.”
Needless to say, like all good conspiracy theories, it contains a grain of truth – there are legitimate concerns about the safety of our photos on social media. However, the whole thing is a sham, and copying and pasting the text as a Facebook post will do absolutely nothing for your privacy concerns.
A grain of truth
In the case of Apple, again, there is an element of truth. Apple is actually sending your iPhone photos to be analyzed by AI, and the feature is enabled by default, however, it’s really nothing to worry about. The feature in question is called Enhanced Visual Search. What this function does is to connect the places in your photos to famous places and landmarks stored in a global index maintained by Apple. In this way, you can be standing next to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or you are in Stonehenge, and automatically tag the place, with Apple not seeing your photos. Apple has released a policy document in November 2024 which says:
“Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search photos with landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches the locations in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and privacy differential, and we use an OHTTP relay that hides the IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos.
Worrying about this as a security threat seems blown out of proportion to me. However, if you really want to turn this feature off then head to Settings on your iPhone and then Apps. Find Photos and then scroll to the bottom of settings. Right at the bottom you’ll see a slider for Enhanced Visual Search, which you can turn off. On a Mac, open the Photos app and go to Settings / General.
The battle for privacy
It’s a strange time for Apple right now. Recently he had deny that Siri had ever sold its customers’ data for marketing purposesafter settling a $95 million class-action lawsuit focused on its Siri assistant. Apple recently released a statement about privacy and Siriwhich unequivocally states that:
“Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose. We are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private, and we will continue to to do.
Despite statements like this, I commonly hear my friends saying things like, “I swear my phone is listening to me and sending me notifications based on what I was discussing.” I never thought that these kinds of things were true, but rather simple cases of coincidence and confirmation biasBut urban myths like this never really seem to go away, despite claims from Apple.
Maybe the recent settlement and Apple’s statement on the matter will only fan the flames for more conspiracy theories, but for me I’m not turning off Enhanced Visual Search anytime soon, or worrying about my iPhone spying on me.
