The referenced Apple blog post[1] is pretty clear on what this feature does, and I wish the author at lapcatsoftware (as well as folks here) would have read it too, instead of taking the blog post as-is. Apple has implemented homomorphic encryption[2], which they can use to compute distance metrics such as cosine similarity without revealing the original query/embedding to the server. In the case of photos, an on-dev…
Let's break this down:
1. Nobody is questioning whether Apple's technical implementation is sophisticated or secure. It clearly is.
2. Nobody is suggesting the privacy toggles don't work. They do.
3. The issue is about Apple deciding that automatically sending data about users' photos (regardless of how securely) is an acceptable default for a feature many users may never want or need.
Consider the value proposition here: Apple invested significant engineering resources into complex homomorphic encryption and differential privacy... so users can search for landmarks in their photos? And they deemed this feature so essential that it should be enabled by default?
This feels like using a golden vault with military-grade security to store grocery lists. Yes, the security is impressive, but that's not the point. The point is: Why are my grocery lists being moved to the vault without asking me first?
A privacy-respecting approach would be: "Hey, would you like to enable enhanced landmark search in your photos? We've built some really impressive privacy protections to make this secure..."
Instead of: "We've already started analyzing your photos for landmarks because we built really impressive privacy protections..."
The sophistication of the technology doesn't justify making it the default for what is ultimately an optional convenience feature.