Apple releases iOS 18.4 On March 31, this update brought a bug fix, New emoji and Apple News’ new recipe section. However, when Apple released iOS 18 in September, a feature included in the update sent iPhone photo data to Apple’s servers to help you better find images in your photo gallery. Apple says this feature enhances visual search and is turned on by default. However, if you are worried about privacy, you can turn off the feature in a few simple steps.
Read more: Everything you need to know about iOS 18
Here is what you need to know about enhanced visual search.
Apple’s enhanced privacy measures for visual search
“Enhanced visual search in photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest,” Apple wrote online. “Your device privately matches the location in the photos to a global index maintained by Apple on our servers.”
According to Apple’s research post, a portion of a photo that may contain a landmark is encrypted and sent to Apple’s servers, so the entire image is not sent. Your encrypted data is also a point in other junk data that is not related to your or anyone else’s image.
After the data arrives at the Apple server, the server will not decrypt the data. It is only suitable for encrypted data. If the server determines whether the encrypted photo data contains the corresponding landmark, the server sends your device an encrypted response, and your device decrypts it.
The company also wrote in a post that it uses a third-party-operated forgotten HTTP relay to hide data’s IP address. And, every time your iPhone sends photo data to the server, a new IP address is given.
But some people question whether this is enough to protect your data. “If my computer sends data to the manufacturer of the computer, it’s not private, or at least not completely private,” developer Jeff Johnson wrote online. “Software errors are enough to make users vulnerable, and Apple cannot guarantee that their software does not contain errors.”
If you are worried about enhanced visual search sending photo data to Apple’s servers, it’s a way to turn off the feature. It is important to note that if you have an iCloud account to store photos or back up iPhone data, your photos will still flow to Apple’s servers. Turning off this feature won’t block it.
How to disable enhanced visual search
1. Open set up.
2. Tap application.
3. Tap photo.
4. Click toggle next to Enhanced visual search.
Now your iPhone won’t send encrypted photo data to Apple’s servers to help you find photos on your iPhone. This also means that searching for images on iPhone may be affected. If you want to re-open the feature, follow the steps above.
More on iOS 18, here’s what to know iOS 18.4 and iOS 18.3. You can also check out our iOS 18 cheat sheet.
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