Comment by avianlyric

> Hence, not understanding Apple's technical explanation of an Apple feature you didn't opt in to sharing personal data

But this is the fundamental issue. The author has no idea if personal data is being shared, they’ve made an assumption based on their lack of understanding. It’s entirely possible that all this service does (and arguably likely), is provide a private way for your phone to query a large database of landmark fingerprints, then locally try and match those fingerprints to your photos.

It doesn’t require send up private data. The phone could perform large geographic queries (the size of countries) for batches of fingerprints to be cached locally for photo matching. The homographic encryption just provides an added layer of privacy, allowing the phone to make those queries in a manner that makes it impossible for Apple to know what regions were queried for.

iOS photos already uses databases to convert a photo location into an address, so you can do basic location based searching. That will involve doing lookups in Apple global address database, do you consider that a violation of people’s privacy?