A developer has noted that Apple’s Photos app shares your iPhone photos with Apple by default, for an iOS 18 feature known as Enhanced Visual Search.This is an expansion of the older Visual Look Up feature, which can recognize objects within your photos, but a privacy note in the Settings app implies that it sends more data to Apple … Visual Look Up Visual Look Up (VLU) is a older feature which aims to identify elements of your photos in order to provide relevant additional information.For example, if you take a photo of a dog, it will attempt to identify the breed.
VLU can identify anything from flowers to landmarks, and can do some quite funky things.For example, making sense of laundry label hieroglyphics, and even telling you what’s wrong with your car.VLU was first introduced in iOS 15, and Apple noted at the time that the feature sends “limited” data to its servers.
Apple notes that this includes location data.Enhanced Visual Search Enhanced Visual Search (EVS) is, as the name suggests, an enhanced version of the feature.Developer Jeff Johnson highlighted in a blog post that this has its own privacy note, which implies that more data is sent.
The EVS-specific privacy note is found in the Settings app: Settings > Apps > Photos > Scroll down to the bottom The note says: The tone of Johnson’s post is rather aggressive, objecting to the fact that EVS is on by default.9to5Mac’s Take While it’s interesting that Apple sees the need to specifically highlight the data sent by EVS, the company does appear to take as much care to protect our privacy as it does with VLU.Personally, I’ll happily leave it on, but you can toggle it off if desired.
One piece of data which shared is location.This is clear as several of my London skyline photos were incorrectly identified as a variety of other cities, including San Francisco, Montreal, and Shanghai. You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day.
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