Last year, Microsoft announced that it would bring a new feature to the Windows 11 operating system, called "Recall». According to Microsoft's explanation of Recall, the AI-powered technology is supposed to take screenshots of your activity every five seconds, giving you an "exploratory timeline of your computer's past," which Microsoft's assistant, Copilot, can then help you study.
The idea is that you can use AI to help you search your computer usage to remember past events.
It didn't take long for privacy advocates to raise concerns that the new feature not only gives Microsoft yet another granular way to exploit consumer privacy, but also creates significant new privacy risks if that data is exposed.
An early review he revealed that consumer privacy was not really or even remotely at the heart of the company's thinking when developing Recall. After some criticism, Microsoft said it would take additional steps to try to address those concerns. It announced that the service would be subscription-only and that access to Recall's encrypted information would be tied to PIN restrictions or the Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-in Security biometric login.
This of course did not console the critics and Microsoft eventually withdrew the release completely.
Until today.
Last week, Microsoft, clearly thirsty for more profit than anything you do, announced that it will bring back RecallMicrosoft hopes that introducing the service with a subscription option for greater security will help with better reviews:
“To use Recall, you must opt in to save snapshots, which are images of your activity, and sign in to Windows Hello to verify your presence so that only you can access your snapshots.”
Like, though but Dan Goodin of Ars Technica reports, even if user A chooses not to sign up for Recall, all users he interacts with may do so, opening the door to a long chain of potential privacy breaches:
“This means that anything User A sends him will be captured in screenshots, processed with optical character recognition and Copilot AI, and then stored in an indexed database on other users’ devices. This will indiscriminately collect all kinds of sensitive material from User A, including photos, passwords, medical conditions, encrypted videos, and messages.”
The simple act of creating this add-on, a massive new archive of detailed user interactions, may be exciting for Microsoft in an era of unregulated data brokers and rampant data monetization, but it creates a whole new target for malicious users, spyware, governments, foreign and domestic intelligence agencies. In a country that is literally too corrupt to enact a modern privacy law.
It's all very... Microsoft.
It's a very bad idea being promoted by a company that knows full well that King Donald is doing everything in his power to silence government regulators who might raise concerns about what he's doing.
It's yet another example of integration pretending to be progress, and Microsoft isn't answering press questions about it because it knows that its continued push for Recall without considering privacy concerns is a bad idea.
She just doesn't care.
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
