Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI
Apple last year deployed a mechanism for identifying landmarks and places of interest in images stored in the Photos application on its customers iOS and macOS devices and enabled it by default, seemingly without explicit consent.
Apple customers have only just begun to notice.
The feature, known as Enhanced Visual Search, was called out last week by software developer Jeff Johnson, who expressed concern in two write-ups about Apple's failure to explain the technology, which is believed to have arrived with iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 on October 28, 2024.
In a policy document dated November 18, 2024 (not indexed by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine until December 28, 2024, the date of Johnson's initial article), Apple describes the feature thus:
