If you’re one of those who blindly trust Apple and its famous speech of “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone”, perhaps you should sit down. It’s true that Apple never makes security or privacy mistakes, but now it has activated a function on your device without warning you, and this is generating more questions than answers. It’s called Enhanced Visual Search, and it basically allows your iPhone to analyse the photos you have saved to recognize places and objects and then you can search for it with the magnifying glass by simply typing “cat” to see all the photos of your pet. But here comes what has made the entire Apple community nervous: this option was automatically activated on millions of devices without anyone giving explicit permission. Yes, although Apple assures that the information is protected, the lack of transparency makes more than one raise an eyebrow and fear for their privacy.
What is Enhanced Visual Search and why is it causing controversy?
We’ll explain it better, as we said before, this new function identifies the elements of the photographs you take or save, so that it offers you information about the objects or people in the photo. Imagine that you save a photo of a pizza, and then in the search engine you type “pizza”, this function allows you to search for more information about what is inside the photo on the web. It is a very useful function when you want to search for a photo but you do not remember the exact date on which you took it. The problem is that nobody asked if you wanted this to happen and for Apple to have direct access to the information contained in all your photographs. Apple decided to activate it silently, and although they say that the information is encrypted and protected, many users are not convinced.
Privacy problems
Privacy has always been one of Apple’s strong points, and that is why this sounds so strange. It is not the first time that the company has faced criticism for something similar. Security experts have criticized the move as setting a dangerous precedent. What’s stopping Apple or another company from starting to analyse photos for other types of information? In 2021, Apple already had problems with a similar system aimed at detecting illegal material in private photos, which generated massive backlash and forced the company to cancel it. Well, this feels a bit like that.
How can you turn off Enhanced Visual Search?
- If all this makes you uncomfortable, the good news is that you can disable the feature manually:
- On iPhone and iPad: Go to Settings > Apps > Photos and toggle the option off.
- On Mac: Open the Photos app, go to Settings > General and toggle it off from there.
Apple hasn’t made it clear, though, whether the data already analyzed is still stored on its servers or whether it will be automatically deleted after you turn off the option.
What happens now?
Apple has decided to keep silence n the face of the controversy. But it’s very likely that we’ll see some kind of update or clarification in the coming weeks (especially if the media pressure continues to mount) to provide more information about this feature.
In the meantime, it’s up to us to decide whether we continue to trust Apple or start wondering what else they might be looking at without us knowing.