“A tweet by user ellieeewbu today revealed that searching ‘brassiere’ in the Photos app on iPhones categorizes photos featuring bras automatically into a group. Women have been responding to the tweet posting screenshots with similar results,” Dami Lee reports for The Verge.
Lee reports, “Most searches show photos of lingerie, bikinis, bare skin, or in some cases, memes.”
“Should the fact that ‘brassiere’ is a category at all be concerning?” Lee writes. “Or is it more alarming that most people didn’t know that image categorization was a feature at all?”
ATTENTION ALL GIRLS ALL GIRLS!!! Go to your photos and type in the ‘Brassiere’ why are apple saving these and made it a folder!!?!!?😱😱😱😱
— ells (@ellieeewbu) October 30, 2017
MacDailyNews Take: We love hysterical tweets about things that everybody else has known about for well over a year (everybody else who’s been paying attention).
“Image recognition was introduced with iOS 10 in June 2016, when the Photos app was updated with deep learning for object and scene detection,” Lee reports. “Apple stressed during the keynote, as well as on its website, that all object detection is done completely locally on the device.”
“In a Medium post, developer Kenny Yin detailed all of the facial expressions and objects the Photos app recognized… a total of 4,432 keywords, ‘brassiere’ included,” Lee reports. “One thing to note here is that while women’s undergarments like ‘bra’ are listed as categories, there’s no mention of men’s boxers or briefs. Clearly someone had to have made a conscious decision to include (or not include) certain categories.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s technology is designed to keep your photos private.
One of the best things about Photos is how it protects your privacy. iOS is designed to take advantage of the powerful processor built into every iPhone and iPad. So when you search your photos, for instance, all the face recognition and scene and object detection are done completely on your device. Which means your photos are yours and yours alone. — Apple Inc.
Google Android’s, however, is a far different story, as Lee notes: “Google Photos does the exact same thing when you search ‘brassiere,’ except your photos are stored on the cloud, in Google’s servers. If anything, this should be the bigger security concern that’s freaking out people on Twitter.”
Here’s Apple’s Craig Federighi introducing the feature back in June 2016 at WWDC 2016:
