The thing is it's not just surprising from a privacy standpoint but also from an engineering standpoint -- this sounds very data-, power-, and storage-intensive, in a device that's very constrained on all sides, so it wouldn't have even occurred to me this was a possibility. When are they even uploading all the videos without blowing through their power budget and internet data limits? Are they heavily compressing it to like one frame per second or something?

> data limits

The data required is small. Each embedding might be 1/2 kB per face.

> power budget

To process a video for biometric feature extraction, it might take 0.5% to 2% of the total power used to record a video. Video uses a lot of power (compression, screen, etc)

Assuming you've got a modern device (e.g. with Apple Neutral Engine). Disclosure: Googled info (Gemini).