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Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall feature is coming back in October (www.ghacks.net)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

198 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If you thought that Microsoft was done with Recall after its catastrophic reveal as the main feature of Copilot+ PCs, you are mistaken.

Microsoft wants to bring it back this October 2024. Good news is that the company plans to introduce it in test builds of the Windows 11 operating system in October. In other words: do not expect the feature to hit stable Windows 11 PCs before 2025 at the earliest.

While Recall may have sounded great on paper and on work-related PCs, users and experts alike expressed concern. Users expressed fears that malware could steal Recall data to know exactly what they did in the past couple of months.

Others did not trust Microsoft to keep the data secure. We suggested to make Recall opt-in, instead of opt-out, to make sure that users knew what they were getting into when enabling it.

Microsoft pulled the Recall feature shortly after its announcement and published information about its future in June. There, Microsoft said that it would make Recall opt-in by default. It also wanted to improve security by enrolling in Windows Hello and other features.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 4 months ago (3 children)

While Recall may have sounded great on paper and on work-related PCs,

Ah yes, all those IT people were probably thrilled with the prospect of Microsoft getting sent constant screenshots of their employees' machines, with all those company secrets, sensitive information, and everything

[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Boy howdy I'm just imagining HIPAA with this.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Also data retention and security it's a nightmare for Title IX and FERPA as well.

Another thing is Microsoft hasn't been talking about compression either, how large are these files? What does it do with networked drives? How do we know metadata collection isn't being expanded?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It never sounded great on paper to me...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Hear me out, I actually had a similar concept in mind, but only for files, emails, calendar entries, bookmarks, that kind of stuff. Things that I actually saved on my computer, not random screenshots of what I'm looking at. This is a huge difference IMO. What I look at should never be saved. Only when I specifically save something, should it persist. I would actually love a FOSS, local and private AI solution that would allow me to simply query anything I've ever saved on my computer with a simple search request, without having to waste time on naming my files. Even better if it would understand the context and stuff. This would especially be useful with photos, as they never have proper filenames, just some generic random stuff. Or with code, if the AI search could understand the context of my code and I could just pull it up using a search terms like "the function for handling DNS over TLS requests a few years ago" or whatever, and it would just pull out that one function from the project. Even better if this could be integrated with a separate, generative AI model, that could make small changes to my already existing stuff. I don't know, e.g. "refactor the function to use LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL TLS library".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The crazy part to me is a local solution (shadow copy) has been around for ever. Why this is even a thing at all is just insane to me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Shadow copy is a completely different thing. Shadow copy creates snapshots(used for version history, among other uses) of files. Recall is a screen recording software, that includes OCR and maybe some AI stuff. At this time, at least, it too is all local. It just isn't secure in the least.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And functionaly pointless other then spying on users (and there is also software for that).

My point is, like a lot of things today, this is a solution looking for a problem.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not diagreeing with that. Although it could be useful, I often forget where I saved things, and something that let's my search my worn history would be rad, but there's zero chance this won't be abused by a large list of people, including but not limited to Microsoft, spouses, bosses, malware, governments, every random application, Facebook, and Microsoft.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

And is just as useful as a functioning search tool.......