The redesign of the Photos app in iOS 18 received mixed approval. We have a set of tips on how to improve iOS 18 Photos by customizing the interface and layout, but the internet seems to have embraced a new, improved visual search feature and is worried about the privacy implications.
Starting with iOS 16, a feature called Visual Look Up will identify common objects, landmarks, plants, animals, and even icons and labels in your photos. When you look at an image in your Photo Library, the information button (i) will glow a little if the visual search can provide additional information. It can even change from the letter (i) to an animal or leaf icon. The functionality improved in iOS 17 and is further improved in iOS 18.
But your iPhone can't do much on the device. There's simply no way to match one of your endless varieties of photos to the thousands of popular landmarks and points of interest around the world: the database would fill your entire iPhone storage and then some. Again.
So, to allow Visual Look Up to better identify common landmarks and points of interest, Apple will use the cloud to match the locations in your photos to a large database of points of interest that it maintains . Of course, this requires your photo (or at least markers and specific data from them) to leave your iPhone. Here's what the privacy implications are and how to disable this feature if you want.
Improved visual search privacy
In Apple's legal notices regarding photos and privacy, it is stated:
Improved visual search in photos lets you search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately associates the locations of your photos with a global index that Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides the IP address. This prevents Apple from knowing the information in your photos.
Note that this is just matching locations, not faces of people or pets (or other animals and plants), which always happens on the device.
What does all this technical jargon mean? Well, “homomorphic encryption” means encryption that allows operations to be performed on the data while it is still in its encrypted state. In other words, your image is encrypted, and then Apple matches the data to its database of landmarks and points of interest without ever decrypting it into a visually recognizable image.
Differential privacy is a way to protect individual data when used in a group analysis. Your anonymized data may be part of a set of data sets, and no one can identify you by looking at just one of them, but if you combine data from multiple sets, you can identify an individual person. Differential privacy is a way to use multiple mathematical methods to protect users from this.
And an OHTTP relay is an “oblivious HTTP relay”. This is a reliable Internet relay that takes encrypted requests and transmits them to a specific location (in this case, to Apple's photo analytics servers) without sending identifying information such as addresses IP, device identifiers, etc. In other words, it separates the “what” of a request from the “who” of the request. So Apple has no way of knowing which user an individual photo came from, nor does any hacker with access to Apple's Enhanced Visual Lookup server.
In other words, Apple is going to great lengths to not be able to know what your photos are or where they come from. This protects your privacy, but also protects Apple from any liability or surveillance demands from government entities.
How to disable enhanced visual search
If you're still concerned about privacy in Photos, even with all this encryption and hiding of identifiable information, you can turn off Enhanced Visual Search quite easily. Visual Look Up will still work, but it just won't be as effective at identifying things like landmarks or points of interest in your photos.
On iPhone or iPad:
- Open settings
- Scroll down and tap Applications.
- Select Pictures.
- You will find the toggle for Improved visual search at the bottom of the Photos settings. Press once to turn it off.
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On Mac, you'll find it in the settings of the Photos app itself:
- Open photos
- From the Photos menu, select Settings (or type Command-comma)
- Select the General tongue
- You will find a check box for Improved visual search at the bottom of the General tab. Click once to turn it off.
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