Devices, methods, and non-transitory program storage devices (NPSDs) are disclosed herein to provide for the privacy-respectful learning of iconic scenes and places, wherein the learning is based on information received from one or more client devices in response to one or more collection criteria specified as part of one or more collection operations launched by a server device. In some embodiments, differential privacy techniques (such as the submission of predetermined amounts of noise-injecting, e.g., randomly-generated, data in conjunction with actual data) are employed by the client devices, such that any insights learned by the server device only relate to “hot spots,” “themes,” or other scenes, objects, and/or topics that are highly popular and captured in the digital assets (DAs) of many users, ensuring there is no way for the server device to learn or glean any insights related to particular users of individual client devices participating in the collection operations.