This morning while perusing the settings of a bunch of apps on my iPhone, I discovered a new setting for Photos that was enabled by default: Enhanced Visual Search. (I manually disabled it before taking the screenshot below.)
Oddly, this new feature has mostly gone unmentioned in the Apple news media, according to Google. Moreover, it has also mostly gone unmentioned by Apple itself, according to Google. There appear to be only two relevant documents on Apple’s website, the first of which is a legal notice about Photos & Privacy:
Dark patterns at play lol. I believe Google also does a similar thing? Like Google Photos on my relatives’ devices accurately groups photos by locations (but I guess that is by seeing the geographic information attached with images).
Yea I know that exists, that’s why Camera apps ask for location permissions when first launched. Why couldn’t Apple just do it that way? Instead of whatever this “Enhanced Visual Search” is.
They do. Enhanced Visual Search is a separate thing:
Enhanced 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.
If you don’t give the camera app location permissions then it can’t add location info to pictures.
The reporting about them just straight up sending your photos or locations is wrong. They put a lot of effort into making it private but it’s understandable that people would be upset still.
Read Jeff’s blogpost a couple of days ago and promptly went to Settings on my iPad to check and it was not enabled. I’m guessing the auto enabling of this feature must be tied to some other related feature in Photos being enabled?