Homomorphic-based Enhanced Visual Search is so privacy-preserving, iPhone giant activated it without asking

I have never liked Apple and lately even less. F… US monopolies

  • dubyakay@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 months ago

    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?

  • jqubed@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    “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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Tim Apple was going to kick $1M to whomever won. For a guy with a net worth in the tens of billions, this is just a tip to the wait staff at the Table Of Success.

      But the Apple photo library is a huge potential source of revenue. Its worth significantly more than $1M. This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images. If you’re not the client, you’re the product.

      • boonhet@lemm.ee
        1·
        2 months ago

        This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images

        Huh? You pay for anything above 5 GB or so. It’s standard for most cloud providers to offer a free tier to get you hooked. Their storage after that isn’t all that cheap even.