Apple Allegedly Collects Private Photo Data From iPhones With iOS 18

Apple, which claims its ecosystem is among the most secure and privacy-centric, has landed in soup with a recent report suggesting that the iPhone shares private photo data with the company. In his report, Jeff Johnson, a researcher and engineer, alleged that iPhones running the latest iOS 18 share data from stored photos with Apple. Data sharing, he highlighted, happens through a tool called “Enhanced Visual Search,” which is turned on by default in the Photos settings.

Johnson’s concerns led him to dig deeper into the Enhanced Visual Search tool, which allows the “device to privately match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple so you can search by almost any landmark or point of interest” when activated. An iPhone running on any of the iOS 18 versions has the toggle inside the Photos settings, but the tool is also available on Macs. According to Apple, the tool helps users look up a landmark when they swipe up on a picture of a building.

However, Johnson’s research points out that Apple applies an on-device machine learning model to analyse a photo “to determine if there is a “region of interest” (ROI) that may contain a landmark.” He said if the model identifies an ROI in the “landmark” domain, it generates a vector for that region. That vector is then encrypted and sent to Apple’s servers where it is matched with other similar entries in the database. While Apple has explained how the process works, it is all too technical. Johnson cited an IBM study to highlight that the encrypted vector embeddings transform “a data point, such as a word, sentence or image, into an n-dimensional array of numbers representing that data point’s characteristics.”

Johnson’s report, however, does not explicitly mention if iPhones with iOS 18 are also sharing additional data about stored photos with Apple. Apple has yet to acknowledge the report and the allegations. Nevertheless, the report paints a disturbing picture of Apple, which has time and again reassured users that iOS, macOS, and its other platforms value user privacy, so much so that the company has mocked Android for not offering the same level of privacy.