Users aren’t particularly happy with Apple’s Enhanced Visual Search opt-in.
Enhanced Visual Search is a tool Apple uses to match users’ photos with landmarks and points of interest. The feature is similar to visual lookup and is intended to make it easier for users to find specific photos. It is automatically enabled on Apple Photos on iPhones using iOS 18 and Macs using macOS Sequoia.
Users appear to be concerned not with Enhanced Visual Search itself — which has been a feature for some time — but with its automatic activation.
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“Opt-in by default to make sure every clueless user will never take the steps to shut it down. Typical shitty corpo movement, so common that I’ll use it as a reminder to check all my privacy options in every service,” one user wrote on Reddit in a post that received more than 1,600 upvotes.
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According to Apple’s Photos & Privacy, there are some protections for users. For instance, Apple says users’ photo data is encrypted when it sees it, and the photos are matched using 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,” Apple’s Photos & Privacy reads.
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“Your photo data is still encrypted when Apple is seeing it; that’s what “homomorphic encryption” allows. You can perform specific tasks against a specific type of encrypted data that alters the data (in this case, gives you information about photo content) without ever having to see the photo,” another Reddit user wrote on the same post. “I disagree about having it turned on automatically, but most people already use the iCloud photo search thing, and this is a better and more private way of doing that.”
Users who don’t want Enhanced Visual Search can turn it off by navigating to Settings, clicking Apps, and scrolling down to Photos. At the bottom of that screen, you can toggle it on and off. On a Mac, open Photos, go to Settings, and click General to find the Enhanced Visual Search toggle.
Apple did not immediately respond to Mashable’s request for comment.
