Women across the world are sort of freaking out about a “hidden feature” in Apple Photos of their iPhones that isn’t exactly new, but it has come to notice of most people just now. This Apple Photos feature has suddenly sparked widespread shock on social media platforms, especially among women.
Apple’s machine learning and AI, embedded into its photo-library app ‘Photos’, apparently enables a feature in the app which most women now find ‘disturbing’. A recent tweet has brought into light the ‘categorization’ feature of the Apple Photos app.
Now, it is important to note that the categorization in Apple Photos isn’t new, but the idea that the app has certain folders where it groups sensitive photos has started to creep out some users. Interestingly, phones running Android that have Google’s “super-intelligent” Photos app also do the same.
In fact, these phones go even one step ahead and save all the semi-nude selfies that a user may have clicked in Google cloud servers, neatly tagged with tags like brassiere or bra. The feature was highlighted on Twitter by user @ellieeewbu who was surprised and in fact quite positively shocked that Apple Photos had a category called “brassiere”.
On Monday, many Twitter users who have iPhones were surprised to discover that Apple has been quietly categorizing their bikini photos, bra selfies, and various nude pictures and making them easily searchable under the tag “Brassiere.”
She tweeted, “ATTENTION ALL GIRLS ALL GIRLS!!! Go to your photos and type in the ‘Brassiere’ why are apple saving these and made it a folder!!?!!?”
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
The feature appears to have innocent-ish origins. It uses image-recognition capabilities that have been part of Apple Photos since summer 2016. “The Photos app makes it easy to find photos of an exact person, place, or thing. Advanced face recognition and computer vision technology let you search your photos by who and what’s in them,” according to Apple’s support page.
While the concern is understandable, it’s important to note that Apple Photos has been grouping photos under categories for a while now to make it easier for you to find a particular image or group of images. Photos use machine learning that analyses the photos for objects, scenes and facial expressions so that it can group them under a particular category.
Apple will have included categories for thousands of objects and places, which is why a category like “brassiere” isn’t surprising. This raises a bigger, more serious concern though. Is Apple collecting the data (in this case, pictures) for further development of its machine learning? If yes, this is a serious privacy concern for most of the iPhone users.
This, however, is not the case. Time and again, Apple has revealed that most of the learning by its software, including facial recognition, object and scene detection is done natively on an Apple device and no information is withdrawn by Apple for this purpose, meaning that the data of the Apple users are completely private.