My iPhone 13 mini will be my last iPhone. They lost me when it turned out they donate to illegal settlements in the West Bank. This is just more fuel to the fire.

I love how Apple advertises "Privacy by default" but they do this

Dammit! You WILL use this tech we spent billions on whether you want to or not.

This is data stealing?

An opt-out that you can't opt out of because Apple already opted you in and took your photos?

This seems like it is going to be a huge lawsuit. Since a class action won't deter them or help us, let's all sue Apple individually in small claims court and kill them by death from a billion cuts.

I don't even get it. Like, make a pop up with a short blurb explaining the feature. Most users will probably opt in, and you don't piss off the ones that don't want this.

Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides [your] IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos. You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General.

Apple did explain the technology in a technical paper published on October 24, 2024, around the time that Enhanced Visual Search is believed to have debuted. A local machine-learning model analyzes photos to look for a "region of interest" that may depict a landmark. If the AI model finds a likely match, it calculates a vector embedding – an array of numbers – representing that portion of the image.

So it's local. And encrypted. How is this really news? Am I missing something?

Where's the "Apple is the only tech giant that respects your privacy" crowd? Just because your data isn't being publicly auctioned doesn't mean they aren't harvesting it and infringing on your privacy.

In case anyone came to the comments looking for directions on how to opt out:

1. Go to Settings. 2) Scroll down and select "Photos." 3) Locate the "Enhanced Visual Search" option. Turn off the toggle.

$1m to Trump and now this!

"Apple is being thoughtful about doing this in a (theoretically) privacy-preserving way, but I don’t think the company is living up to its ideals here," observed software developer Michael Tsai in an analysis shared Wednesday. "Not only is it not opt-in, but you can’t effectively opt out if it starts uploading metadata about your photos before you even use the search feature. It does this even if you’ve already opted out of uploading your photos to iCloud."

Reading the article, the service itself is interesting and it sounds like Apple might have found a way to process the data while preserving user privacy, but the fact that they unilaterally opted everyone in without giving them a choice is the biggest problem.

The Fappening: Part II

Although this is terrible, once again a headline on lemmy made me paranoid only to find out that my phone probably doesn’t even support this.

Going through the settings and turning things off is second nature to me by now, it’s not unique to Apple (looking at your Microsoft).

What we need is an opt out mode on every device. Similar to the accept necessary cookies only, we need every device to let you fully opt out from everything it can when you boot it up for the first time.

What does F.... stand for?

Oops didn't mean to! /$

For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.

In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing "AI" to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.

As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.

And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.

To what end? They claim they can't read the data, nor the output, nor where it originated from. So... what's the point? If their claims are true then what is the point of all that data transfer, processing, and the massive engineering efforts they've put into it? If it's just so they can tag a location, then they could have just used geo location on the device without sharing anything. If it's to be able to search for " Eiffel Tower" and see pictures you have of it, well, haven't they already been able to do this before this feature with on-board AI processing that doesn't require the data to be shipped to Apple? Something seems off to me, but maybe because I'm not clear on the purpose.

Nothing but depressing news for common people all around.

Apple opted customers in, got sued, and will now prompt customers if they want to be opted in or out.