Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

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Style Pass
2024-12-28 19:30:04

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:

The second online Apple document is a blog post by Machine Learning Research titled Combining Machine Learning and Homomorphic Encryption in the Apple Ecosystem and published on October 24, 2024. (Note that iOS 18 and macOS 15 were released to the public on September 16.)

Of course, this user never requested that my on-device experiences be "enriched" by phoning home to Cupertino. This choice was made by Apple, silently, without my consent.

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