Indeed, Apple has only talked about the feature in a privacy notice and a technical blog post on encryption. This feature relies on both local and cloud processing to help place your photos in the world.

A new feature in iOS 18 shares users’ photos and photo data with Apple by default, a setting that has raised concerns about privacy. Called “Enhanced Visual Search,” the feature allows the “device to match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple” in order to search photos based on landmarks and other information within photos.