Since iOS 18, the Photos app is able to recognize places. Just open the photo and tap the little "i" icon at the bottom. This is a small new feature of the visual search function which since iOS 15 already allows you to identify an object or an animal (not to be confused with Visual Intelligence which will not be available until next April in Europe).
An option to uncheck to no longer send data to Apple
The only problem is that identifying places changes the privacy settings. A new option has appeared in the settings of the Photos app: "Enhanced visual search". It lets your iPhone or Mac match locations in photos with an Apple-powered “global index” to find “virtually any landmark or point of interest.”
Apple’s Machine Learning Blog tells us a little more about how this new feature works, which starts with local processing to determine whether there is a “region of interest” (ROI) that could contain a landmark. If necessary, a vector representation is calculated for this region of the image, then the request is sent to Apple's servers.
In its legal notices, the manufacturer assures that it uses "privacy protection techniques such as homomorphic encryption and differential confidentiality, as well as an OHTTP relay to hide your IP address".
Spotted by the developer Jeff Johnson, this setting is enabled by default. While the Apple company explains that it is unable to extract information from the photos, the fact remains: this data is sent to Apple without the user really being aware of it, unless they take a look at the settings. Too bad for a company that never stops boasting about its good privacy practices.
Source: The Verge
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