This is how facial recognition in Photos works

From my origins with Apple, when I bought my first iMac in 2009, one of the things that attracted me the most about using the Apple Photos app was the recognize the people in the snapshots, and be able to create fun presentations with all the photos of the same person. After many years Apple finally brought that functionality to iOS and shortly after had your devices sync facial recognition to iCloud.

But all this then brought the typical doubts about our privacy, and that is that Where was this recognition carried out? Where is the data of the recognized persons stored in our photo library? What happens to all the data obtained during that survey, such as places, dates, etc? Apple explains it to us and we give you a summary with the most interesting details below.

Everything is done on your device

The facial recognition algorithm is carried out on your device, be it your iPhone, iPad or Mac. The whole process happens locally on your smartphone, tablet and computer, because it can't really happen anywhere elseSince your photos, even if they are stored in iCloud, are encrypted on Apple's servers and only your devices with your iCloud account "can see" them.

This is something that plays in favor of privacy but has been important challenges for Apple and has important consequences that Apple has tried to minimize as much as possible. One of them is that those computational algorithms for facial recognition must be physically stored on the device., occupying a precious part of the storage memory of the device to be included in its operating system.

But not only that, but also when this facial recognition process is carried out, the RAM memory and the work of the CPU and GPU must be shared with the rest of the system processes, which is a serious inconvenience in mobile devices, such as the Iphone. This is why most of the "hard" work is done when the device is locked and charging..


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