And now the world finds out your phone is quietly figuring out the content of your photos

your iPhone can look at photos and see + understand: ✅ cat ✅ beaches ✅ trees ✅ fridges ✅ nose hairs ✅ dick pics ✅ sex photos 🙃 sorry

Look it’s all in good fun, but Apple’s implementation here is good: machine learning models downloaded, but all crunching happens *offline*

Apple’s mistake is users don’t understand how their phones suddenly know why “boob” and “penis” reliably return photos No prompts, opt-in

It’s handy when your phone can find cats and you don’t think of why, but when it suddenly processes nudes you’re like...who’s doing this?

There’s no switch or UI affordance, so you have no idea *how* it’s going on. If I wasn’t in tech, I’d assume Apple was looking at them

tl;dr - making machine learning seem magical is great but your users will be EXTREMELY uncomfortable when that magic becomes apparent

weird side effect: if you try google photos it tells you it lets you do this! So you’re like cool, this handy thing from my phone