Apple introduced Enhanced Visual Search in iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1, which scans local photos for points of interest without users’ explicit consent. The feature is enabled by default, but can be disabled in the settings.
Day.Az reports this with reference to The Register.
Apple says Enhanced Visual Search compares images locally against a global index of points of interest stored on the company’s servers. To protect privacy, it uses homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, and a Cloudflare relay that hides the user’s IP address. Apple claims it does not access the content of the photos.
The way it works is as follows: a local machine learning model identifies potential landmarks in a photo, creates an encrypted representation of them, and sends them to the Apple server for comparison with the database. The server returns the result in encrypted form, which is decrypted only on the user’s device.
Experts confirm that when the system works correctly, Apple does not gain access to the original photo data. However, the question of potential vulnerabilities and side channels of information leakage remains open. Apple says its encryption and differential privacy techniques ensure the protection of user data.