Sneaky iOS 18 setting shares photos with Apple — how to turn it off
A new feature in iOS 18 shares users’ photos and photo data with Apple by default, a setting that has raised concerns about privacy.
Called “Enhanced Visual Search,” the feature allows the “device to match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple” in order to search photos based on landmarks and other information within photos.
While the setting intends to make the Photos app more efficient and searchable, developer Jeff Johnson raised issues with the privacy of sharing such data with Apple despite the so-called “enriched” iPhone experience.
“From my own perspective, computing privacy is simple: if something happens entirely on my computer, then it’s private, whereas if my computer sends data to the manufacturer of the computer, then it’s not private, or at least not entirely private,” he wrote in the most recent entry on his blog.
“Thus, the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device.”
The choice to toggle “Enhanced Visual Search” on, then, “was made by Apple, silently, without my consent,” he said.
“It ought to be up to the individual user to decide their own tolerance for the risk of privacy violations,” he argued.
He pointed to the numerous security and privacy flaws that Apple has needed to patch in recent years, which are typically accompanied by urgent update warnings.
“A software bug would be sufficient to make users vulnerable, and Apple can’t guarantee that their software includes no bugs,” Johnson wrote, claiming that the data from the “Enhanced Visual Search” feature could potentially be exploited by malicious actors.
According to Apple’s “Photos & Privacy” document, the tech giant said that the data used for “Enhanced Visual Search” is encrypted and the IP address of users is shielded so that Apple cannot learn from the information in the photos.
To turn off “Enhanced Visual Search” on your iPhone, open the Settings app, navigate to Apps, then Photos and scroll to the bottom of the page. On a Mac, open the Photos app then head to Settings, then General to toggle off.
Experts recently urged Apple device users to update to the latest version of iOS 18 despite their fears of AI or otherwise, as a bug in the non-updated software could leave customers vulnerable to malicious actors.
The bug could be exploited by hackers to access users’ sensitive data without a trace — and the longer people wait to update, the higher the risk.
