Apple’s iPhone photo feature sparks privacy concerns
In a move raising eyebrows among privacy advocates, Apple’s latest iOS update includes a photo search feature that shares encrypted data with the company by default.

Apple has introduced an ‘Enhanced Visual Search’ feature in iOS 18, allowing users to identify landmarks in photos by matching data with a global database. While convenient, the feature has sparked privacy concerns, as it is enabled by default, requiring users to manually turn it off in settings if they prefer not to share photo data with Apple.
The feature uses on-device machine learning to detect landmarks in photos, creating encrypted ‘vector embeddings’ of image data. These are then sent to Apple for comparison with its database. While the company has reportedly implemented privacy safeguards, such as encrypting and condensing data into machine-readable formats, critics argue the feature should have been opt-in rather than opt-out, aligning with Apple’s usual privacy standards.
This toggle builds on Apple’s earlier ‘Visual Look Up’ tool, which identifies objects like plants or symbols without sending data to Apple’s servers. Privacy advocates suggest that Apple could have maintained this approach for Enhanced Visual Search, questioning why it requires shared data for similar functionality.
The debate highlights ongoing tensions between technological convenience and user privacy, raising questions about how far companies should go in enabling features that require data sharing without explicit consent.