And for bikinis, and for corsets, and for any other undergarments as long as they are women clothing

Oct 31, 2017 10:34 GMT  ·  By

The Internet went crazy over an iPhone feature that was around for more than a year and which groups photos stored in the camera roll in categories based on a series of automatically-recognized keywords.

Women (and men, though that would be a little awkward, but hey, we don’t judge) who use an iPhone, just try a little experiment: open your iPhone, head over to the Photos app, and search for “brassiere.” (yeah, we know, you’re not taking that kind of photos, but this is exactly what so many celebrities claimed a few years ago, and here they are sending their army of lawyers after whoever posts The Fappening leaks.)

If the search returns a category holding photos featuring bras, bikinis, corsets, or pretty much any type of lingerie, you should know that’s entirely normal, and it’s something that every iPhone does if you allow it to. It’s not something that Apple rolled out overnight, and it’s certainly nothing to worry about. Unless you take photos that you shouldn’t, but we already decided that you’re not doing such a thing, right?

So basically the whole frenzy started after someone who goes by the name ellieeewbu on Twitter posted a message saying that “ATTENTION ALL GIRLS ALL GIRLS!!! Go to your photos and type in the ‘Brassiere’ why are apple saving these and made it a folder!!?!!?”

Fake alert

At first glance, it sounds like something outrageous that Apple should obviously not be doing. But this is actually a feature that was introduced with iOS 10 in June 2016 and which uses image recognition to group photos into different categories based on object and scene detection.

In-depth looks at how the image recognition system works revealed that Apple uses several thousand keywords to group these photos, including brassiere, bras, corset, and girdle. This means that if you take photos of you… err… bare skin, there’s a chance there might be a dedicated category just for that.

But as The Verge points out, the odd thing is that men underwear isn’t actually on a list, so if you were looking for certain categories like boxers or briefs, you’re not going to find any. Yet, Apple itself says there’s nothing to worry about if any unexpected categories show up on your device because everything is performed locally, with no information uploaded to the cloud.

And for what it’s worth, Apple isn’t the only doing it. Google rolled out a similar feature for Google Photos back in 2015, pretty much with the same functionality. The only difference is that the whole thing takes place in the cloud, and not locally. Now that’s something you should really be worried about.