Apple's implementation of Enhanced Visual Search in its Photos app has sparked privacy concerns due to its automatic landmark identification feature and lack of explicit user consent.
Apple last year deployed a mechanism for identifying landmarks and places of interest in images stored in the Photos application on its customers iOS and macOS devices and enabled it by default, seemingly without explicit consent.The feature, known as Enhanced Visual Search, was called out last week by software developer Jeff Johnson, who expressed concern in about Apple 's failure to explain the technology, which is believed to have arrived with iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.
1 onEnhanced 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. 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.published on October 24, 2024, around the time that Enhanced Visual Search is believed to have debuted. A local machine-learning model analyzes photos to look for a'region of interest' that may depict a landmark. If the AI model finds a likely match, it calculates a vector embedding – an array of numbers – representing that portion of the image. Apple then uses homomorphic encryption to scramble the embedding in such a way that it can be run through carefully designed algorithms that produce an equally encrypted output. The goal here being that the encrypted data can be sent to a remote system to analyze without whoever is operating that system from knowing the contents of that data; they just have the ability to perform computations on it, the result of which remain encrypted. The input and output are end-to-end encrypted, and not decrypted during the mathematical operations, or so it's claimed
APPLE PHOTO APP PRIVACY ENHANCED VISUAL SEARCH LANDMARK IDENTIFICATION
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