Be careful of your intimate photos, selfies on your iPhone. Here's why
In an era of changing norms around privacy and the internet world, people have started questioning whether their devices know them too well. A recent viral tweet (@ellieeewbu) raised an alarm about iPhone's photo recognition feature. The feature sorts photos on the user's iPhone into categories and shockingly, it also has a folder for ‘brassiere.’
ATTENTION ALL GIRLS ALL GIRLS!!! Go to your photos and type in the ‘Brassiere’ why are apple saving these and made it a folder!!?!!?😱😱😱😱
— ell (@ellieeewbu) October 30, 2017
According to a report by The Telegraph UK, some iPhone users discovered that when you search for the word ‘brassiere’ on the phone's photo app, they found photos of bras, which it ideally should do. However, what was shocking was that the search pulled up personal and intimate photos of the users who clicked themselves in the nude or with a bra on. While the privacy concern is totally understandable, the feature is actually not new — it seems that many iPhone users were unaware of it existing in the first place.
Apple Photos has been grouping pictures under categories for a while now. This is done to make it easier for users to find a specific photo on their device. Apple uses facial recognition and machine learning technology that analyses the photos automatically and tags them for easy extraction when needed.
Developer Kenny Yin had earlier posted a comprehensive list of all the keywords that the Photos app can recognise. However, Image recognition in iPhone has been around in Photos ever since iOS 10 was announced in 2016.
The iPhone's feature of automatically categorizing photos into folders has triggered concerns of whether Apple is scanning the data of users' photos in order to improve its deep learning algorithm, which could compromise users' privacy. Google Photos also uses a similar AI technology to analyse photos and saves it on Google servers, unless a user disallows the service to sync their photos.
The report also mentions The Verge stating that 'Apple confirms all object detection is done locally on the device and not transmitted to Apple servers, though users should still be wary about what they might be automatically uploading to their iCloud'.
So, in short, users should make sure that they only sync data with online cloud services that would not cause any privacy concerns.
