Apple Photos phones home, but doesn't actually tell Apple anything about you ➹

There’s witch hunts, and there’s discussions about online privacy.

It’s true that Apple keeps changing the Photos UX in… unfathomable ways, and also that they keep dropping the ball with iCloud features when what most people really want is a) a no-fuss user experience and b) a set of clearly labeled options that explain what is being sent to the cloud and when.

But this isn’t them dropping the ball in any other way than not having made this explicitly opt-in.

I fully get it that Photos isn’t really “calling home” with any personal info. It’s trying to match points of interest, which is actually something most people want to have in travel photos–and it’s doing it with proper masking and anonymization, apparently via pure image hashing.

But it does feel a tad too intrusive, especially considering that matching image hashes is, well, the same thing they’d need to do for CSAM detection, which is a whole other can of worms. But the cynic in me cannot help pointing out that it’s almost as if someone had the feature implemented and then decided to use it for something else “that people would like”. Which has never happened before, right?

The key thing is that people are (finally) becoming really sensitive to the idea of sharing any traceable information, and now it’s turned into Internet news because people are generally distrustful of any cloud services (and, yet, paradoxically, use social networking apps).

I just wish Apple had rolled this out more sensibly and had a toggle to turn off all of the UI junk in Photos. Now that would be something.

Happy New Year!