Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent
Some very cursory googling suggests that `smoot.apple.com` is used for Spotlight. My guess is this is actually the &quot;visual look up&quot; feature recently added to iOS and macOS, where Quick Look and other system apps will perform OCR on images, and will also attempt to recognize animals&#x2F;plants&#x2F;landmarks&#x2F;etc and offer to look them up for you.<p>Taking a look at System Settings, it seems the relevant part of the privacy information for Spotlight is here:<p>&gt; When you use Siri Suggestions, Look Up, Visual Look Up, when you type in Search, Safari search, #images search in Messages, or when you invoke Spotlight, limited information will be sent to Apple to provide up-to-date suggestions. Any information sent to Apple does not identify you, and is associated with a 15-minute random, rotating device-generated identifier. This information may include location, topics of interest (for example, cooking or basketball), your search queries, including visual search queries, contextual information related to your search queries, suggestions you have selected, apps you use, and related device usage data to Apple. This information does not include search results that show files or content on your device. ...<p>&gt; This information is used to process your request and provide more relevant suggestions and search results, and is not linked to your Apple ID, email address, or other data Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.<p>My understanding is that any actual image recognition is done on-device, so the image itself (or any compressed&#x2F;hashed version of it) is not sent to Apple. At worst, I suppose Apple might receive a list of features identified by the local image recognizer (i.e., &quot;siamese cat&quot;, &quot;eiffel tower&quot;)<p>I&#x27;d be curious if disabling &quot;Siri Suggestions&quot; would disable this. It seems like it should.<p>I think it&#x27;s reasonable for very privacy-conscious people to be concerned about behavior like this, but it comes off as paranoid when you wildly jump to conclusions without doing even 5 minutes of research.