Microsoft Will Switch Off Recall by Default After Security Backlash

Your browsing history is unlikely to contain personal information, secrets, porn images etc. And if you use Chrome, they get your full browsing history by default.

I get your point, but Microsoft's Recall can capture anything onscreen - emails, personal info, porn, passwords and the like. And it feels, bizarrely for 2024, that little thought has gone into privacy or security.

Yeah, I think this entire debate is uninformed hysteria and manufactured outrage. "If an attacker has administrator access, they can see everything you have done on your computer!". OK? That has literally always been the case? "Attacker is root" is game over and always has been. The original writeup from DoublePulsar tried to justify that Recall is somehow different from other such scenarios, but I found it totally unconvincing.

I think it's the right move to have it off by default, but I'm just not convinced by the outrage here.

Browsing history doesn't contain what's displayed on the page, and what you input into the input boxes, or POST requests. It's sorta like telephone metadata.

On the other hand, I am always freaked out by Chrome extensions that "can read and change your data on all websites". Can't they have more granular permissions? You gotta have a lot of trust for those extensions LMAO. They can read your bank passwords, probably!! And if they are ever sold...

Does Recall run entirely locally? I don't think your browser history gets sent out

no it isnt the same, you may know I went to my health care provider's website, maybe even to make an appointment depending on the url, but with recall, everything that is on the page will be stored, not just the url. It's totally different. So the message I sent my healthcare provider that is discussing some of my most sensitive medical issues will be available to read and a record is kept of it... not just the url. Do you not see the difference?

1. Browsing history doesn't show what the user is doing on the page. There is a big difference between logging "user visited his e-banking app", and logging his actual credentials as they are entered.

2. Browsing history watches one app. Screenshots watch everything across the entire OS.

This is a horrible comparison. Browsing history doesnt show the contents of the page. It doesnt show you what you were doing on that page. It doesn't reveal anything other than you went there and maybe how long.

They're quite obviously very different, as browser history doesn't tend to include things like financial details or information subject to an NDA.

Their is a very different scope at the OS level.

Most of us know that the public Internet is based on surveillance capitalism, no matter if we hate it or are just complacent or ignorant.

OS wide is far more problematic and of low value to the user.

One difference is that Web browser history has been there 30 years, since before most people at the time had even touched a Web browser.

At the time, it wasn't very thinkable that someone would have the audacity to take and abuse that information.

It dates from when Internet people overall were more savvy about privacy than users overall today are, but it was also when the Internet was closer to a trustworthy environment, and before Wall Street sociopath types took over the tech and the culture.

Lots of kinds of abuse that today are routine and almost universal, for even startup tech companies, (e.g., embedding third-party trackers into Web site, and getting even worse from there), I think would've gotten them ostracized, and outraged demands for criminal charges.

During the dotcom gold rush, there was such a flood of totally new, posturing people, and so much money being thrown wildly at everything, that any remaining outrage was lost in the noise.

And now virtually no one knows any different.

But if you're trying to push some new abuse today, I think ordinary people are starting to have some awareness of what vicious sociopathic buttholes tech companies have become, and so acceptance might not be a slam-dunk.

The ickier parts are on the unintended capture side, like enabling "show password" on a site doesn't affect browser history but Recall may capture it in the clear.

Or from history you may see that you accessed a site, but not what you did on it (what comments you typed for example).

Talk on zoom to the wife while bathing the kid, stored on recall. VC the girlfriend, stored on recall.

Does your browser history store pictures of your family?

Your browser history doesn't contain screen recordings of what you do on websites

If there's AI involved, everyone's panic level skyrockets.

No one retweets "Attacker gaining root access reveals all user information", but instead "Attacker gaining root access reveals all user information collected by AI program" will go viral for sure.

For tech savvy people, it's a bewildering feature. Why would I want some weird unpredictable AI thing when I've already got filesystem search, browser bookmarks, the neatly categorized PDF collection, and my Zettelkästen/2GB Org.mode doc/Joplin notes?

But for non-technical people, of course, computers are already unpredictable. They routinely (appear to) misplace files and overwrite them with previous versions, and if the URL falls out of autocomplete the site might as well not exist. For people who google to find the Facebook login page, this would simply be how computers should work. You tell it to give you the thing and it gives you the thing. How that happens is immaterial.

I've heard Microsoft wants to do away with on-device Windows entirely for consumer devices, and go with a "dumb client" form factor that is always connected to a remote Windows server.

I'm not sure who at the org is pushing for this as it would essentially hand the PC games market to SteamOS. I suppose they saw how well it's worked for enterprise customers that essentially already use a Windows VM through Citrix or some other provider, and think this would solve the virus/malware problem once and for all.

Security nightmare aside, it seems like it would be handy all the time. Surely everyone has had trouble finding a website or document or email again, days or weeks later?

It could be handy if the data was stored locally and was managed by the users.

When this was announced I actually saw a post by someone who used a similar tool for time tracking in OS X and they claimed it was really helpful.

To be frank, I would not mind having this feature on linux provided it was entirely local, and encrypted.

Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it?

Because they bet big on AI, and hardware suppliers bet big on AI-enabled hardware, and so they are trying to find use cases for it.

This applies to most AI features that have been released recently. It feels like almost every business that wants to think of itself as a tech company has been desperate to throw out as many new features as possible that they can slap an AI label onto.

Most of those features are garbage and make the product worse, either because they don't address an actual problem or because they are implemented poorly. But of course improving the product is at best a secondary concern, chasing the hype is far more important, both for the company itself and the individuals building this stuff.

In all the MS Recall drama, I've yet to hear or read one single person utter something to the effect of "Wow - great!!! - I've been waiting for something like this for years! This will solve at least one of the major issues I face regularly!".

There were definitely some comments in a previous HN post about it that attempted defend it and to paint everyone else as overreacting. Several of them even said that they thought it would be useful for something they might hypothetically like to remember or search for... I don't really remember, because the whole thing is crazy to me and I think it's crazy for any tech-savvy person to be running Windows in 2024.

Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it?

I assume this is a rhetorical question, but just in case it isn't: this is not a feature/product for Windows USERS. This is a feature to help train/test MS's AI stuff- YOU are the product, not the customer.

Just go to Windows Central, and you will get a couple of editors shouting exactly that.

Honestly this whole thing reeks of some sort of data grab dressed up as an "innovative" new feature. They probably wanted a bunch of new training material for their AI projects, and this is what they came up with.

I can be that guy. I use Rewind for Mac, which is almost identical to Recall in functionality. I love it, and I've used it frequently to find things that otherwise would have been lost forever.

Most recently I used it to refresh my memory on a particularly convoluted way to authenticate with a third-party oauth system (it involved using an online oauth debugger and curl commands). I had gone through the process once successfully weeks ago, but by the time I had to do it again I'd forgotten every detail. Rather than have to go through the process of figuring it out again, I went back to my successful attempt, watched it, and basically retraced my steps. Rewind probably saved me an hour or two.

My take on Recall is that, like with almost everything, it's a trade-off of security for convenience. I find it valuable enough that I'm willing to make the trade-off, but others might not.

If I knew that the data could be absolutely kept safe and private to me, I’d love a feature like this. Keeping track of my work over time would be so much easier.

The natural next step is to have a local model trained on everything I’ve ever done, and for all of my computing tasks to be contextual to that history.

I could see this transforming how we use computers.

But I wouldn’t go anywhere near Recall.

I suspect Microsoft is pushing this so hard because they want to do what I just described, and they want to start collecting the data necessary to enable it ASAP.

I can easily see a future capability that people might love that they wouldn’t have even known to ask for. But the way they’re rolling out Recall is certainly not a good foundation.

All the replies ignoring the elephant in the room: three letter pressure. To me such large moves could indicate an event is in the near/medium future.

Has the new Copilot devices even launched? Because I don't think that aside journos anybody else has even tried to play with the Recall yet.

Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it?

Here's the thing. When no-one asks for it, hard push is the only way to sell it.

:)

when nobody asked for it

It's easy to say if you aren't one to benefit from this, but that doesn't mean no one will or that no one asked for it.

I've heard some people say this, but those people either don't understand what's going on, or they have to start off by staying, "security issues aside," which is basically saying that they'd like it in a magical world where they could have the feature without anything the system is doing to enable the feature.

I use the search inside Windows all the time. To me, this seems like a 2% improved version of that. Probably useful, mostly mundane, something I would use but not get excited about.

I assume they would push it for the same reason they would push any other mildly-useful feature improvement.

On the contrary, executives at the office have been coming to me about various such tools for months now. It really picked up last fall.

Microsoft was last to the party.

Rewind.ai is the Mac version of this and many is the same talking points apply. However, it’s a third party tool, and as such isn’t enabled by default.

I think most, if not all, of the overwhelmingly negative feedback is tied to this being enabled by default, and shipped by default

As long as stockholders think it'll be good, that's what matters. Perceived value is easier to create than real value.

Dear OS writers:

Internet access is not always guaranteed or reliable. Please do not assume that the cloud is a viable solution for every user.

I ran into this on my phone awhile back. I knew I would be out of service for some time but had some PDFs I needed to reference. So I downloaded them to "files". Que surprise when I later go to look up a value and there's a little cloud with a down arrow button next to the PDF in the files app, which of course fails because I'm nowhere near any internet access. Even more fun: turning off the cloud integration in files just causes the files to disappear, even if you are currently connected. It's allergic to local storage.

The proper way of doing it is to use the API calls that have existed for decades to get the paths of well-known folders. It is because they are known to move and in fact having a roaming profile on a server location dates to the mid 90s with WinNT.

If you're hard coding paths you're doing it wrong.

Yes, Onedrive started out as a pretty useful tool but has turned into a deceptive trojan that tries to force whatever growth metric MSFT managers are currently chasing through a combination of dark patterns (like hiding true file paths from view) and also simply refusing to operate in obviously useful ways which many users want and expect (like not having a built-in way to back up only specific sub-folders on different drives (forcing paying users to trick it by using junctions)).

Hang around kids and even though they can be pretty good at using a computer, they have no clue how the thing actually works. They don't know what a file is anymore. Everything is a shiny little icon in a shiny little magic folder.

Not trying to make this sound like a value judgment, more an observation. But it makes you wonder, what do we lose by excessive abstraction.

I recently tried to fully rid myself of OneDrive and it took me over 48 hours to accomplish. The only working method I found involved fully enabling OneDrive, signing in, and waiting for a full sync. Only then was I able to tell it to stop syncing and finally remap Documents, Downloads, Pictures, etc.

The fact that I needed to log in, wait 24 hours for my account to unlock due to inactivity (!!!), and enable sync in order to disable it was enough for me to finally decide that Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft product. It may be a small annoyance, but to me it was the straw that broke the camel's back.

It is infuriating when I open the file explorer and it takes many seconds to populate the side bar. This wasn't the case wit windows 10. Everyting in one drive really makes things take a long time. OneDrive is great, but I want a OneDrive folder where things are sync'd, not transparently transforming the file system into OneDrive.

I just got a new PC and went through the same thing! Incredibly frustrating that in something Godot I have to manually traverse through folders to get to where I want to actually save a file (like.. Documents)

Always set Windows up with a local account to avoid this nonsense. Used to be relatively straightforward in Windows 10, but MS made it a lot harder to dodge in 11.

Interesting, our experiences are different here. I suspect it's because I installed Windows 11 (23H2) using a local account using the OOBE bypass (not because I particularly hate the Microsoft account thing, but because this machine uses an external WiFi adapter and requires drivers in order to work, so I could not have done it even if I wanted to). The drivers are actually included on the device, but there's not a clear way to accomplish a driver installation while in the captive OOBE, even given the ability to launch a command line.

I did later connect my Microsoft account. In my installation the OneDrive folder is empty and the entries in Explorer map to the normal places (C:\Users\X\Pictures etc). If I open one of the default folders, it does show a "Start backup" entry in the address bar that is referring to OneDrive, though. If I open the OneDrive folder, it asks me to sign in (entering password) and set it up-- which is funny, because the Windows user is signed in using a Microsoft account already- so seems like they haven't connected those dots properly yet. In theory this might be their way of implementing a security check for uploading all your files, but if so it's an awkward way to do it.

Additionally, some programs still seem to want to use the OneDrive folder by default, like I think Office programs still do their best to use them.

If I remember correctly, there is an API that programs can use to locate common folder locations for users (such as Documents, Pictures, etc). My guess is that your account still points to the C:\Users\X\OneDrive\Pictures instead of C:\Users\X\Pictures. If you could adjust those directly (maybe in the registry?), I would imagine that it will work correctly in these programs, especially since I doubt those programs would break on my setup, where there is no OneDrive subfolders (though I don't use Office so I can't check). And in case you wonder if there really are no subfolders in OneDrive since I can't open it in Explorer without signing into it- it shows nothing when viewed via PowerShell.

This is especially obnoxious for Desktop and Remote Desktop Connection.

The former because my desktop is... where I want things just a certain way for THIS computer, not across the cloud. And because it's a PITA to undo and set it the correct way.

The latter because of course I use Remote Desktop on multiple computers, but it keeps saving a "default" file in the same place across computers, and throwing errors left and right because they conflict. So stupid.

Yes, my company just went through a merger and for quite a while we had two OneDrives showing up and it was difficult to tell where the default folders were in addition to being a huge mess any time a file dialog opened. I've actually reverted to creating folders in C:\ to store files so I know where they are.

you just have to use dopus as a file explorer replacement and just use dropbox (with cryptomator of course...) to yield (in most respects) best in class file management and sync

I unfortunately had to use Windows last year, and the whole mix up between local folders and OneDrive folders meant that the only way to not go insane was to avoid using those folders altogether, create a C:\MyStuff folder and store everything there.

I like this video of Jonathan Blow ranting about the file explorer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le6dvr95Z2Q

If you think this is bad, there was a period last year that my documents folder would suddenly rename itself to "Documents" but in a different language. This would religiously change every few days. Other people have reported it as well.

I have disposed of my last PC now and have nothing to do with the infernal things, or onedrive, or any of that crap ever again!

It will be re-enabled accidentally by an update anyways.

What would prevent a virus from directly stealing the data it wants without going through this feature?

what would prevent a virus from just enabling it

If that occurs, the malware won't have access to months or years of data to sift through.

Or Microsoft just decides they need to really market the hell out of AI and it gets turned on my default anyways.

This is what will happen. And when you turn it off again, it'll be turned back on by the next update. Enjoy.

They can't even do their own infra securely, or did you forget a advanced persistent threat entity was in their system and minting certs to access all of azure recently?

Hmm. I think I can respond here.

No one is really saying this feature has no value. For a user, there is value to being able to get to a previous point in time. That feature, however, is clearly not very well designed and implemented if it took days for it to be cracked on the internet for everyone to see. If I could trust that it STAYS local, maybe I would be less paranoid. But this is MS we are talking about.

Personally, I am glad this thing was created. It may be finally make people hesitate over the evolution of PCs.

The concept itself has value, but the ethical and legal concerns are severe, not to mention the issue of Recall also capturing sensitive stuff like passwords.

Microsoft, Google, Apple - everyone is scared shitless of some AI startup kicking their nutsacks, and is launching products that should have gone through extensive ethics discussions beforehand in a matter of weeks.

It is puzzling to me that so many people seem to think this concept has no value. To me the concept is obviously good and something I have wanted for a long time.

The issue is not that the concept has no value. The issue is that the risks and drawbacks are so severe, that they override any value the concept would have.

It's like asbestos, or leaded fuel; these have several useful properties, but their drawbacks are bad enough that they have been banned in many places.

the concept is valuable but so ripe for abuse that even it existing at all is a threat to everyone's privacy.

I have been a windows user basically my whole life. 3 years ago I got an ipad pro (2018, 12.9") for drawing and I hate the operating system. 7 months ago I got a steam deck and its fine for games but doing anything in the OS is confusing and annoying.

Microsoft announced recall and suddenly I'm using a spare computer to test linux distros, and I suck at everything to do with linux and I'm doing it anyways.

It's too dangerous, to much an invasion of privacy, and too easily enabled completely outside of my control.

People will opt-in to it during setup the same way people opt-in to logging in via a Microsoft account instead of a local account.

Doubting they'll even disable it at all.

"game pass is only available with Recall enabled!"

"microsoft office features y and j require Recall! please click here to enable it"

etc etc

The corporate settings that care already do this to the employee screens ...

Compliance doesn't say "company can't watch employee" -- in many cases it mandates surveillance.

This just lets the employee leverage that too.

Corporate is never on the bleeding edge of Windows feature updates. They bring security updates first, but feature updates are at least one generation behind, maybe more waiting for Microsoft to fix bugs and doing their own regression testing, plus they get to choose wich features employees receive or are enabled by default via group policy. In other worlds, recall was never making it into any corporation anyway.

Corporate clients get whatever they want. I am certain that their Windows 10 support won't be pulled in Oct 2025 as MS has threatened for everyone else. And when they migrate to Win11, it will almost certainly be a separate OS image free of the garbage bloatware and ads that the consumer devices are plagued with.

I think on the product side it’s pretty straight forward. They saw RewindAI talking up a bunch of traction and people seemingly interested. Someone assumed customers wanted this because of that data, and it’s a pretty easy thing to build, so they went ahead. I am surprised it got past security reviews but I can understand how it came to be from the product side.

They’ll probably think twice before jumping into the fray again with the Microsoft branded Informant Wire (I mean AI wearable) ;)

I bet there are a trillion companies and governments who want to know what all of their employees are doing every second of the workday. compliance won't stop them from trying.

With Chat Control[1] coming up in EU, it would be awfully convenient to have the technological capability readily available to deliver a solution.

Once you have the Recall capabilities, it doesn't take much to start collecting and searching the data.

[1]: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

"Total Recall", aka "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"

They should take note and recall Recall.

It would actually be a fantastic name if this were a real concern. Imagine, a well-known feature to mask any searches of a product recall. The only problem with this theory is that computer QA is so incredibly shit that the concept of a recall more or less doesn’t exist in the first place.

Any Recs? i've just gotten a Kubuntu image. I am thinking if i dual boot that and SteamOS i should have everything i want covered.

Yes, it's a really tough thing to manage this whole Recall thing philosophically and it makes me concerned about this OS. Even if MS is backtracking somewhat, they have shown their cards now and how they prioritize positioning themselves as an AI company above even rudimentary privacy. It's hard to just regain trust as if nothing happened.

I'm considering Linux with a Windows VM for Visual Studio. I've had my Linux detours in the past and it honestly works pretty well for me. I personally enjoy Fedora with Gnome which I think strikes a good balance between stability, security, and freshness. But if being stable and worryfree is of top importance (like where you are "unpaid tech support", haha), why not just go Debian. :)

If you want Linux isn't "just working" over time, give macOS a look. My dad was a lifelong Windows user and sung the praises of Microsoft's monopoly over the industry. As much as he was disappointed and upset with Borland Software dying off, he thought the benefit of a single document format everyone used was a huge benefit for the industry early on when Word started to take over, and by extension all of the standardization through a single player rather than through actual standards. He always said it worked great and didn't see why he'd ever want to change, or why anyone would want anything different.

He ended up switching to Apple around 15 years ago after a series of bad experiences. He was very nervous about it, and really hedged his bets early on. It took him some time to get used to how the OS worked, to find new apps to replace some that he had used since the Windows 3.1 days, and sort out his workflows. He eventually gave up his Windows VM when he realized the only thing he ever used it for was to run Windows Update.

I grew up on Windows, with the views from my dad instilled in me. In college I tried Linux and ultimately moved to the Mac about 21 years ago. I still used Linux on and off for the past 22 years (and currently have a music server running it). I do find Linux to still be much more finicky than macOS. No system is perfect, but macOS is more of a "just works" operating system than Linux (imo), likely due to the focus on polishing that last 10% of the user experience, that never seems to get the attention it needs in Linux. While I am excited to see what Cosmic has to offer later this year on Pop OS, I'm always ending up having to deal with some level of nonsense, even my most recent install of Mint just last week had a few annoying things where things didn't work, and they should have worked.

I'm aware that other OSes exist, but I happen to hate Windows least on the whole :/

Have you given Linux a try? Unless you have an Nvidia card or an Adobe workflow; it is usually good. The Nvidia issue may go away in a year.

I'm aware that other OSes exist, but I happen to hate Windows least on the whole :/

Would you like to share what you like about windows that you don't have on other operating systems, or what puts you off about other OSes? Not trying to be passive aggressive, just curious

I'm glad that it's shining a light on the reality of Windows 11 as a subscription and data collecting vehicle.

If you still hate Windows least, that's almost certainly because it's what you know best. I work with Windows, Linux, and OSX on a daily basis and Windows is easily the most user-hostile of the three.

Edit: All you know -> What you know best

How can you have the number of employees they do and not have a single non-sychophant employee?

As someone who has tried to push back against what execs ask for many times, if they want it bad enough, it doesn't matter. They will push forward no matter what the objections are. And if the person objecting won't give in, they'll find someone else to do it.

Knowing you could turn on recall to spy in this way implies an individual with the technical know how to grab a freeware keylogger anyways.

Similarly with airtags, you have been able to buy cheaper cellular based GPS trackers for years prior to airtags existing.

In the airtag case, those GPS tags also do not alert the individual that there is a beacon following their person, and as such most likely go unnoticed and under reported.

This is sheer moral panic. Of course tools can be misused by bad people, but that doesn't make it the tool's fault ("how many women will be beaten and murdered because of Recall"). It is the fault of the person misusing the tool to do bad things.

Can't we just have a peaceful life without wasting time on constantly following and analyzing every single move from these companies?

Not if you're using Microsoft products, no.

People continue to get irritated when "we" do this, but here I go: you should be running Linux exclusively on your personal computers. You should also stop buying "smart" shit.

Have you not seen Windows 11 lately?

I have, and I am still happy to be on Linux as my daily driver for over 20 years now.

Microsoft will go ahead with Recall, will temporarily make it opt-in. Eventually, when weather is good they’ll default it to opt-out. If new backlash ensues they’ll PR that it was a a bug and turn it off only to bundle it later with something that can’t be turned off.

At this point MS is a toxic company that you’re better off, as a user, to steer away from.

Yeah. You tell everyone you learned your lesson and then just go back and do it anyway a year later.

Yes.

Windows is soo low quality. It feels cheap. It feels like you are at a car dealership.

Fedora, feels like you are at some futuristic office that has buttons that do multiple steps. I was literally angry last year that it took me so long to learn about up-to-date linux. Canonical's marketing of debian-family linux gave Desktop Linux a bad name.

Yeah, which is why I'm over on Linux now.

Twitter used to do this all the time; they'd make the notification email options more granular and opt you in to the three new options that used to make up the one option you already unchecked.

I'm surprised by how good proton is at running windows games on steamdeck. Because of this and nonsense like recall and the adverts in windows I'm considering just getting rid of windows all together, I'll just run mint Linux probably.

Not to mention all the dark pattern lying nag dialogs that will trick you into turning it on, or just wear you down.

I'm a little more optimistic. Cortana was mandatory at first. Not easy for the average user to disable. Then Cortana was optional. Easy to turn off and uninstall. Then Cortana was just gone. Floated off to the big orbital in the sky.

If Recall continues to inspire grumbling and receives very little praise, I could see it unceremoniously removed in a Windows 12 26H2 Feature Update.

Given their eagerness, I'd guess:

on by default in Windows 11 25H1, impossible to disable in Windows 11 25H2

where they can then verify, minute-by-minute that their remote employees are grinding away for every minute they are paid for. i'm convinced MS has two profit models here: 1) NSA/CIA/FBI/ETC 2) employer monitoring of remote workers.

Employer IT departments already have access to and can install any number of tracking and screen-watching products to monitor their employess on work-issued computers. It's perfectly legal though in my view pretty scummy behavior.

The AI training team asked for this feature

(I’m being a bit provocative and assume today it stores locally only but a future TOS change will secretly and “anonymously” upload your data ‘for training purposes’ —- that’s what everyone else is doing these days)

In theory you could have always just installed a screen recorder to record your spouse even before this.

And how are they going to convince people to be surveilled voluntarily? This needs to be behind a switch they can silently enable in some update, ofcourse.

We will never see Microsoft ship a major product like this and not have it bundled in to a windows update. (Rather than specific install)

After their success with installing Teams, Microsoft has seen that the regulators will not proactively stop this kind of thing anymore

I agree, I think the current state of the AI is absolutely incredible technology, but I just don't see a 'product' yet.

If chat and co-pilots are all we get out of this wave of investment, then I'm not sure if it's been worth it.

Have a look at Rewind.ai for some idea about the use cases maybe. Some people are already paying for the feature, so it clearly has some value.

https://www.rewind.ai/

Personally, data privacy/protection and compliance aside, I’d find it fairly useful on my work computer.

This is something nearly on par with the xbox launch debacle

Mind bogglingly tone-deaf and out of touch with what users want

From the lack of security we could assume Nadella himself created Recall over the weekend with the help of Copilot.

how would the recall data get expanded if it is not plugged in all the time? hopefully you can see while it's not designed that way

If your clients are storing sensitive PII on their desktop or my documents folders, they're already likely way the fuck out of compliance. Nice FUD though.

I think the main difference there (apart from the feature being deprecated over a decade ago) is that Coverflow stored a single thumbnail, from which you couldn't derive much information - it's metadata alongside your browsing history, but not much more than that.

Meanwhile Recall takes a stream of high-quality images, from which a full reconstruction of your entire computer-use activity over the last 90 days can be reconstructed in high fidelity and searched through.

From a security point of view, the threat models are a world apart.

Here's what Qualcomm is saying: https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...

They claim they're all in on making Linux work seamlessly on the Snapdragon X. I'll leave it up to you on whether or not to believe them.

It'll be the other way around I expect. Recall will provide more context to CoPilot.

It's not really about looking back at your own activity in case you forgot. But the AI will use it to learn about your habits, wants and hates, interests, people you deal with, usual schedule etc.

An assistant is after all much more effective if it knows you through and through. The one problem is: I don't want Microsoft to be that assistant and know all that about me. Even if "it's all local". They still control what gets done with that info and can change it at any time.

and abusive partners/stalkers.

This. I won't be surprised at all if i' silently enabled in a future update that has nothing to do with it.

... then you can turn it on for yourself. Unless you think it's a shame it's disabled for other people? Why would you be concerned about that I wonder?

Are you switching to Mac?