DO YOU REALLY WANT APPLE TO SHARE YOUR IPHONE , IPAD, MAC COMPUTER PHOTOS WITH THE WORLD?

Do you really want Apple collecting your personal photos from your iPhone, IPad, and Mac. Well Apple is currently accessing your photos without your permission and endangering your privacy to bad "actors" who will use it to potentially make you victims of personal internet privacy fraud, extortion and other uses to harm you.

A new feature in iOS 18 shares users’ photos and photo data with Apple by default, a setting that has raised concerns about privacy.

Called “Enhanced Visual Search,” the feature allows the “device to match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple” in order to search photos based on landmarks and other information within photos.

While the setting intends to make the Photos app more efficient and searchable,  issues glaringly exist with the privacy of sharing such data with Apple despite the so-called “enriched” iPhone experience.

4

The Photos feature in iOS 18 is automatically activated for all users.

From my own perspective, computing privacy is simple: if something happens entirely on my computer, then it’s private, whereas if my computer sends data to the manufacturer of the computer, then it’s not private, or at least not entirely private.Thus, the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device.It ought to be up to the individual user to decide their own tolerance for the risk of privacy violations. No software should automatically make that decision by default for the user of it's product.

4

“Enhanced Visual Search” can be toggled on or off in the Settings app.

There have been numerous security and privacy flaws that Apple has needed to patch in recent years, which are typically accompanied by urgent update warnings.

A software bug would be sufficient to make users vulnerable, and Apple can’t guarantee that their software includes no bugs and the data from the “Enhanced Visual Search” feature could potentially be exploited by malicious actors.

According to Apple’s “Photos & Privacy” document, the tech giant said that the data used for “Enhanced Visual Search” is encrypted and the IP address of users is shielded so that Apple cannot learn from the information in the photos.

To turn off “Enhanced Visual Search” on your iPhone, open the Settings app, navigate to Apps, then Photos and scroll to the bottom of the page. On a Mac, open the Photos app then head to Settings, then General to toggle off.

If you don’t do that, the default setting is to allow Apple to access your photos. This affects iPhone users who have the iOS 18 current version and Mac users who have the current iOS 15 version. As Apple upgrades its IOS future versions it will likely continue to default to allowing your iPhone to give access to Apple of your photos. So pay attention re- future iOS update versions as you will likely have to again toggle off the “Enhanced Visual Search Setting.