The referenced Apple blog post[1] is pretty clear on what this feature does, and I wish the author at lapcatsoftware (as well as folks here) would have read it too, instead of taking the blog post as-is.
Apple has implemented homomorphic encryption[2], which they can use to compute distance metrics such as cosine similarity without revealing the original query/embedding to the server. In the case of photos, an on-device model is first used to detect if a landmark may be possibly present in the image, and then sends an encrypted embedding[3] for the image region containing said landmark, which is evaluated on the server using HE techniques and then the encrypted results are sent back.
I'm sure someone will come along and say Apple does none of these things; in which case, said commenter should probably not use Apple devices since, there is no reason to trust the toggles for "Enhanced Visual Search", and perhaps more importantly, the one for "Advanced Data Protection" either. However, I rarely see any other major company researching ML and HE together, so that alone is a sufficient positive indicator in my eyes.
(It's interesting that this is also being downvoted. Please go ahead, I can't stop you :P but please also write the parts that you disagree with. Thank you.)
[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
[3] https://mlr.cdn-apple.com/video/HE_Fig_3_PNNS_889f3a279c.m4v
Apple has implemented homomorphic encryption[2], which they can use to compute distance metrics such as cosine similarity without revealing the original query/embedding to the server. In the case of photos, an on-device model is first used to detect if a landmark may be possibly present in the image, and then sends an encrypted embedding[3] for the image region containing said landmark, which is evaluated on the server using HE techniques and then the encrypted results are sent back.
I'm sure someone will come along and say Apple does none of these things; in which case, said commenter should probably not use Apple devices since, there is no reason to trust the toggles for "Enhanced Visual Search", and perhaps more importantly, the one for "Advanced Data Protection" either. However, I rarely see any other major company researching ML and HE together, so that alone is a sufficient positive indicator in my eyes.
(It's interesting that this is also being downvoted. Please go ahead, I can't stop you :P but please also write the parts that you disagree with. Thank you.)
[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
[3] https://mlr.cdn-apple.com/video/HE_Fig_3_PNNS_889f3a279c.m4v