Enhanced Visual Search In iOS 18 Sends Your Photos, Without Your Consent, To Apple By Default To Recognize Landmarks

iOS 18 is one of the biggest updates released for the iPhone, bringing numerous new additions to the table, including Apple Intelligence. The company also pays a great deal of attention to the privacy and security of user data, claiming that Apple does not see the contents with end-to-end encryption. It has now been discovered that iOS 18 shares photo data with Apple by default, making the contents of your images visible to Apple.

iOS 18 and macOS 15 share photo data with Apple by default, but you can turn it off

As mentioned, iOS 18 and macOS 15 share users’ photo data with Apple through Enhanced Visual Search. If you are unfamiliar with the feature, Enhanced Visual Search was introduced with the release of iOS 15, which recognizes objects in your photos and sends them to Apple by default. You have the option to turn the feature off through the Settings app on your iPhone as well as Mac.

Developer Jeff Johnson made the discovery, claiming that iOS 18 and macOS 15 Sequia share photo data with Apple through a feature called Enhanced Visual Search, and it does that in a complex manner. The feature allows the device to detect certain landmarks for better context in the Photos app. While it is a pretty neat addition, Apple has been gathering user data without their consent, and it could pose a problem for the company as well as the end user. If you are not familiar with the mechanism, navigate to Settings > Apps > Photos > and tap Disable Enhanced Visual Search to turn it off.

Developer Jeff Johnson claims that the feature operates on two distinct levels, relying on machine learning to detect landmarks or objects in photos and creating a vector embedding, which is a digital representation of the characteristics of the monument or an object. Since the feature is enabled by default, users might be sending photo data to Apple to identify landmarks in photos unknowingly. This raises privacy concerns for users, but you can easily turn off or disable the Enhanced Visual Search feature through the settings app.

Any information sent to Apple does not identify you, and is associated with a 15-minute random, rotating device-generated identifier.

While the photo data is shared with Apple, I would personally leave the feature enabled, as the company does a lot to protect user privacy. We will share additional details related to the story, so be sure to stick around. Apple has not shared a direct response to the privacy concerns, but we will keep an eye out for official statements. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.