| Apple has confirmed to the media that as of December 2022 that they are not pursuing on-device CSAM scanning: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/9/23500838/apple-csam-plans... macOS Ventura exposes new object and scene recognition features for images, including background removal in Preview (analogous to "Copy Subject" in Photos but without requiring the use of that app): https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-remove-image-backgro... You can also use Spotlight search with keywords such as "flower" or "cow" to find images on your local storage that have those subjects; I don't recall if that is new to macOS Ventura or has been possible for several versions of the OS. mediaanalysisd is a daemon which has for years been responsible for, well, media analysis and would perform any network tasks required to support features such as the above when previewing an image. It would not surprise me if not all image recognition tasks are done exclusively locally, although I haven't found documentation of how much exactly is or isn't. It has long been the case for speech recognition, for example, that not all of it could be done offline (although more of it can be on Apple Silicon machines). The only way to opt out of OS-level features that send any data to Apple at all is to opt out of using macOS; even then, as I recall, the Asahi Linux installer has to pull certain bits from Apple servers for copyright reasons. |