Apple iPhone fans need not worry – your gadget does not have a secret folder hidden away that has all the sexy selfies you have taken.
Some iPhone, iPad and iOS users were left fearing there’s a folder of all the pictures they’ve taken in their bra and lingerie stored on their device.
It came after a tweet from Twitter user @ellieeewbu went viral on Monday.
She tweeted: “ATTENTION ALL GIRLS ALL GIRLS!!! Go to your photos and type in the ‘Brassiere’ why are apple saving these and made it a folder!!?!!?”
The tweet has been retweeted more than 15,000 times and like over 29,000 times.
However, there is a perfectly innocent reason for what the tweeter came across.
Since iOS 10, iPhones have been able to classify more than 4,000 objects and scenes based on images alone.
This is thanks to sophisticated AI that is able to recognise objects that are common, such as a bra, to more obscure things like an abacus or a zucchini.
The artificial intelligence was trained on a library of hundreds of thousands of labelled images.
And it has the ability to accurately distinguish one object it has learnt about from another.
The iPhone image recognition AI can not only tell the differences between a dog and a cat, but also recognise a dachshund from a corgi.
Express.co.uk tested out a number of different keywords in the search bar of Photos on iOS to see if it brought up any pictures.
Typing in ‘dogs’ accurately brought up all the pictures stored on the test device of pooches.
Entering ‘meat’ brought up plenty of pictures taken of meals, while ‘hat’ brought up all the saved pictures of people wearing headwear.
These photos are not stored away in folders labelled ‘hat’ or ‘dogs’.
It is simply that the AI, once it detects something it recognises, puts a relevant tag in the metadata of that photo.
So, when users typed in ‘brassiere’ and bra-related photos appeared – it’s search result and not a hidden folder of lingerie images.
However, the advanced iPhone image detection should not be a privacy concern to users.
The photo recognition is carried out on the iPhone itself, with each gadget running a unique version of the AI, according to The Guardian.
So any risque pictures you may have on your iPhone remain entirely private.
In comparison, Google uploads all images stored on Google Photos to the cloud, and then the bulk of object recognition is carried out there.
Apple have a page on their website which details how the Photos app in iOS can easily “find photos of an exact person, place, or thing”.
They explained: “Advanced face recognition and computer vision technology lets you search your photos by who and what’s in them.”
The Cupertino based tech giant added: “When you search your photos, all of the face recognition and scene and object detection are done completely on your device.”
Google, by comparison, uses images that are uploaded to the cloud to help train their AI better to understand what is appearing in a picture.