iOS 27 (build 21A558) arrived on June 10, 2026 and altered the Hide Faces feature.
The update’s release notes say the Clean Up tool now "replaces hidden faces with new faces" when you try to blur them. In practice, selecting a face in Photos and choosing Hide Faces produces a different, unblurred face rather than the intended mask. The change is documented as a bug fix for the Clean Up workflow, but the actual behavior is the opposite of what users expect.
For anyone relying on face‑blurring for privacy—journalists, researchers, or casual users—the tweak removes a previously reliable way to obscure identities. It also raises questions about Apple’s testing of UI changes that affect personal data handling.
Apple’s own notes frame the change as a "fix," but the result is a feature that now does the very thing it was meant to avoid.