Verbesserte visuelle Suche teilt Ihre Fotos standardmäßig mit Apple, um Orte zu erkennen.

A Developer has noticed that Apple's Photos app shares your photos with Apple by default to use a new iOS 18 feature called Advanced Visual Search.

This is an extension of the older visual search function, which can recognize objects in your photos. But a privacy notice in the Settings app implies that it sends more data to Apple...

Visual Search

The Visual Search (VLU) is an older feature aimed at recognizing elements in your photos to provide relevant additional information. For example, if you take a photo of a dog, it will try to identify the breed of the dog.

VLU can recognize everything from flowers to landmarks and can do some remarkable things. For example, it makes sense out of clothing label hieroglyphs and can even say what is wrong with your car.

VLU was first introduced in iOS 15, and Apple noticed at that time that the function only sends "limited" data to its servers.

When you use the "Visual Look Up" feature, only limited information is sent to Apple to provide relevant suggestions. Any information sent to Apple does not identify you and is associated with a randomly rotating device-generated identifier for 15 minutes.

Apple considers this as including location data.

Improved Visual Search

Improved Visual Search (BVS) is like the name suggests, an improved version of the feature. Developer Jeff Johnson emphasized in a blog post that it has its own privacy concerns, implying that more data is sent.

The specific privacy notices for EVS can be found in the Settings app:

Settings > Applications > Photos > Scroll down

The notice states:

Allow this device to privately compare locations in your photos with a global index of Apple so you can search for almost any landmark or interest.

Johnson's post has an aggressive tone and focuses on the argument that EVS is enabled by default.

This user never asked that my device experiences be 'improved' by a call to Cupertino. This decision was made by Apple without my consent and silently.

In my view, privacy on computers is simple: If something happens on my computer, it's private. But if my computer sends data to the manufacturer of my computer, then it's not private or at least not completely private [...]. By activating "features" without request, Apple respects users and their preferences. I never wanted my iPhone to connect with Apple.

Remember this ad? "What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone." That was clearly a lie.

It's interesting to see that Apple sees the need to explicitly highlight the data traffic of EVS. The company seems to be equally careful with protecting our privacy as it is with VLU.

Improved Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately compares locations in your photos with a global index that Apple maintains on our servers. We use homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, as well as an OHTTP relay that hides your IP address. This way, Apple cannot learn anything about the information in your photos.

I would personally like to activate it, but you can disable it if you want.

A data point that is not shared is location. This is clear because many of my photos of the London landscape were identified as different other cities, including San Francisco, Montreal, and Shanghai.

VergeMaxim Berg on Unsplash.