So basically, Apple has been using some weird boob recognition category to tag and track and group all your semi naked selfies into a folder called “brassiere”. No, sorry, this isn’t a cute Halloween prank where Charlie Brooker leaps from the pixelated ether in what turns out to be a fun new interactive trailer for Black Mirror.
Seriously: go onto your iPhone photo folder, click the search button, type in brassiere (a word you may not be familiar with because I’m pretty sure only the M&S lingerie department use it when they’re awkwardly cupping your boobs to size up your first training “brassiere”, but FYI it means bra), and voila! A wonderful display of all your tit pics for you to compare and contrast. Just look at how the light is so much better in your mouse-riddled flat bathroom than the Topshop changing rooms. How the lager-doused pub you’ve made your second home has definitely had an affect on your wobbly bits, and actually your boobs are way better for it. How your ex really didn’t deserve that smokin’ snap you climbed on the loo (also a category for your photos) for to get the best angle of your new overpriced lacy bodice.
While the frankly quite unnerving news has gone viral after a tweet from Twitter user @ellieeewbu, it’s not new: image recognition technology was introduced with the photos update in iOS 10 way back in June 2016. At the time, Medium reported a fairly extensive list of keywords that the app categorises images into, one we all clearly missed while we were busy taking selfies with cats.
Honestly though, if this is the extent to which Apple plough into our privacy, you’d think they’d at least have a basic grasp of modern language and its colloquialisms. As well as “brassiere” there’s “phonograph”. There’s “greenswards”. There’s a “breaking dawn” folder for all the blurry orange snaps you took stumbling out of the club at 6am amid an epiphany about the relativity of time; there’s a “disc jockey” folder for all the banger spinners you enthusiastically papped when they fiiiiinally played Wild Thoughts, OMG.
Here we all were thinking Siri is a technologically advanced young women with a middling to average sense of humour, when really ‘she’ is probably an 87-year-old ‘he’ who spends his days tending to his greensward and prowling boobs on the Internet.
Catfishing these days huh.