Opting Out of Visual Look Up and iCloud Photos
This is much worse [than Photos.app’s Enhanced Visual Search]: open an image containing a “landmark” in the Preview app, then open the Inspector. An icon will appear which, when clicked, will popup information about the landmark. Verified with a JPEG with no GPS metadata. Take a screenshot of the opened image, the same works in the screenshot. This is system level and turning it off in the Photos app has no effect.
I found that Preview will identify landmarks—i.e. it is sending a neural hash of my photo to Apple’s servers—even without my having the inspector open and even though I have Enhanced Visual Search unchecked in Photos.app’s settings. I think this is due to the Visual Look Up feature introduced in macOS 12.3. The way to turn this off is unintuitive. It’s not in the settings for Photos or Preview or even Privacy. Instead, you go to System Settings ‣ Spotlight and uncheck Siri Suggestions.
Why does
photoanalysisdwant to phone home?I don’t have iCloud Photos enabled. I don’t have Enhanced Visual Search enabled. And I wasn’t doing anything with photos. This just happened randomly in the background.
I don’t know what this is or how to turn it off. Maybe it’s downloading place names based on geotags? I assume it’s not related to Visual Look Up, which uses mediaanalysisd.
Before I enabled iCloud on the new Mac, I installed a configuration profile created with Apple Configurator app. The purpose of the configuration profile was to prevent iCloud from silently enabling features that I don't want. I discussed this technique last year in a blog post about how to stop iCloud Keychain with a profile. My configuration profile disables not only iCloud Keychain but also iCloud Photos, Siri, Diagnostic Submission, and Apple Personalized Advertising.
But there was a bug where it instead enabled iCloud Photos and locked the setting so that he couldn’t disable it.
Previously:
- Opting Out of “Help Apple Improve Search”
- Privacy of Photos.app’s Enhanced Visual Search
- Apple Intelligence Privacy Dark Patterns
- Apple Updates Silently Enable iCloud Keychain
- Siri Suggestions and Privacy
- Network Connections From mediaanalysisd
- Monterey’s Visual Look Up
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> "i.e. it is sending a neural hash of my photo to Apple’s servers"
Is this true/verified though? Or an assumption?
Could it not be, that clients (macOS) have a local hash-database that can be queried in private/locally somehow?
@Obra I’m going by Howard Oakley’s reporting:
Visual Look Up is dependent on multiple internet connections to several different Apple servers. Much of the work is performed by VisionKit and VisualSearch. These initially analyse the image and determine which type it is. If it’s a painting, they then calculate what Apple terms a Neural Hash, a near-unique signature which is largely independent of colour balance, resolution, even cropping within limits. That Neural Hash is then looked up online in Apple’s dictionary to find the nearest match, for which details are then fetched from Apple’s servers.
