On: Homomorphic encryption in iOS 18

[Klonoar]

They are not sending your actual photo, as has been covered at length on numerous threads on this very site.

[gigel82 → Klonoar]

That's irrelevant if the information they do send is sufficient to deduce "Eiffel tower" or "dog" out of it: that's too much information to send.

[GeekyBear → gigel82]

They don't have to send anything since they do all the image recognition on the user's own device.

Sending everything to a server is, however, how Google's service works.

[gigel82 → GeekyBear]

No they don't, the whole reason for Homomorphic encryption is sending stuff out of your device.

You don't need any encryption to process locally.

[GeekyBear → gigel82]

The erroneous claim was that Apple handles image recognition and image search on servers, the way Google does.

Apple handles those tasks on the users own device(s) for privacy reasons.

[gigel82 → GeekyBear]

They do handle image recognition (at least some aspects of it) on their servers, unless you specifically went and disabled the right setting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42533685

[rendaw → GeekyBear]

I don't think anyone made that claim in this thread.