Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
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The damage is mitigated by the fact it only recalls last 3 days by default
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Forensic data recovery. How many 500GB drives ship to PCs that never use more than 20% of that?
Are Microsoft a big, evil company?
A. No, that’s insanely reductive. They’re super smart people, and sometimes super smart people make mistakes. What matters is what they do with knowledge of mistakes.
I have no doubt there are smart employees, but they don’t call the shots. Case in point.
The dude set up a strawman argument, then didn’t even bother to burn it down properly.
I get the security issues, sure, those are valid, but the privacy ones are even worse. Imagine a teenager trying to search information on being gay, or possible intrusive thoughts on their family computer, only for their super maga right wing parent to find it in the screenshots.
Or someone being abused at home and searching for support facilities, deleting history and being outed by recall.
Wait, how about credit card fraud as a result of EVERYONE who has access to this computer can read your cc data?
Or, my husband was looking at jewelry online yesterday and he hasn’t told me, he must be cheating, right? Oh sorry, I forgot, our anniversary is next week… Hahahaha, don’t be upset babe.
Best one ever though, imagine your search history, your porn watch history accessible to anyone with access to your computer? The fucking horrific existence of having an employer process this data at scale using fancy staff monitoring program 7, and run stats on the fact that you had a toilet break while working from home, and they want to know if it was a number 1, or a number 2 so they can work a mean time to shit metric into your KPA/scorecard.
Guys, whatever benefit you think this is. It’s not worth it.
Ultimately privacy is part of security so, if anything, everything you mentioned is just more reinforcements that this is a major security concern.
As someone that has been obsessed with tech since being a kid in the 90s I think the tech side of this is super cool and very exciting stuff. As a user, though, I only like this if I’m the one implementing and using it. I do not trust a mega corporation (or really any company) to “leave it locally on my computer and totally not use that data for other purposes”. Right now it’s supposed to be (as far as I last heard) only on your machine but we’ve seen EULAs and TOS’ etc change many times over the years but especially over more recent years as data continues to be king and data like this is a literal bottomless diamond mine.
I know this isn’t your point but it’s just worries I have in addition to your points. And let’s not even start about what this means for law enforcement abuse. No thanks, I’ll wait for a FOSS equivalent that at least gives me and the community the opportunity to evaluate how it works.
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Are you… Are you saying EVERYTHING can be hacked with one line of code?
Ever since those Aliens brought us their ancient and mysterious line separator tech, we have all we need to do just that!
Independence day was indeed a great movie. Who would have thought they also use X86 architecture?
As much as I lean to hate this despite it not even affecting me as a Linux user…
I’m going to structure this as a Q&A with myself now, based on comments online
What is that? “I’m going to pretend to ask questions that I’ll then answer myself the way I think it’ll outrage that most people do I’ll get a lot of clicks on this shitty article”? What crappy excuse for content creation is this? I hate it.
I follow Kevin on Mastodon. He’s the real deal and is absolutely not interested in the clicks or outrage. He’s trying to make it accessible.
Agreed. The way i took it was “i am going to write ‘questions’ based on the concerns people are commenting online and give the answers to those things people are interested/worried about”
Eh, they could have written it differently, each time hypothesizing that someone might wonder XYZ, but I appreciate the brevity of this format. And I do not think that the questions or answers are unreasonable.
Do you mind calling out the questions you think are inappropriate or exist for rage clicks? What constitutes a good article for you if this is a shitty one?
You may not but the customer support rep at a company that had your info uses windows. Same for the insurance companies, various government agencies local with limited it experience as well as national.
I saw that as anticipating the questions they’ll get regarding this article and pre-answering them.
I cant believe they are including this in enterprise edition too.
They usually keep their dirty spyware out of the enterprise editions to avoid losing corporate clients who dont want their secrets easily pluckable.
My hospital will be freaking the fuck out about this right… about…. Now.
We should have let the government actually break up microsofts monopoly long ago. Now they will abuse it to force millions of Americans to use their spyware.
The full article is well worth reading. It’s good to find a lucid, logical deconstruction of why, precisely, this will be a complete disaster.
thanks Microsoft
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Does anyone yet know how to break stuff like Copilot?
I don’t have Win11, but I also never really trust that MS won’t surreptiously push this kind of thing in the background to legacy systems, and I don’t trust UI toggles within Windows to actually do anything.
Do we know if there are services or files that Co-pilot needs to function?
Do we know if there are services or files that Co-pilot needs to function?
Co-pilot requires windows. I’m going to try Linux Mint and see how that goes.
Microsoft, stop giving me Red Star OS flashbacks. (If im not mistaken, it records your screen and stores it in a police-only folder)
I keep hearing all the rabble rousing about this from a security perspective, but is there not an incognito mode to the Recall capability?
There cant be.
It literally screenshots what you’re doing every few seconds, and builds a plain text database of any and all text it captures.
Incognito mode is not having it installed.
Hmm that didn’t sound right so I had to look it up. Microsoft says there’s a way to pause the recall snapshot functionality for a set amount of time, like an incognito mode:
Pause or resume snapshots To pause recall, select the Recall icon in the system tray then Pause until tomorrow. Snapshots will be paused until they automatically resume at 12:00 AM. When snapshots are paused, the Recall system tray icon has a slash through it so you can easily tell if snapshots are enabled. To manually resume snapshots, select the Recall icon in the system tray and then select Resume snapshots.
I don’t understand why there’s so much FUD around this product…
You don’t understand why there’s so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt about an on-by-default program that records everything you do? Are you being serious right now?
I find it hard to take seriously anyone who throws the term FUD around with no sense of irony.
Yeah not to be obtuse here, but I think the fear is over sensationalized. I haven’t seen it in person, but it seems like this is a totally new product that is similar to idea of browser history, but adds in some modern features. I would like to check it out.
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That’s not correct. Based on the documentation, Windows Setup has an option to enable/disable the feature on first boot.
The documentation also says it doesn’t capture incognito windows and I mentioned in my other comment that you can turn it off temporarily and permanently. It doesn’t run all the time no matter what, like some of the comments have suggested.
Here’s a screenshot of the config page with a simple toggle to turn off:
Windows 11’s Recall feature is on by default on Copilot+ PCs
Disabling the AI snapshotter requires a trip into Settings for ordinary users
Over the weekend, The Verge’s Tom Warren posted (on twitter) screenshots showing Microsoft’s latest Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE), in which the Recall feature can’t be turned off unless the user opens Settings after completing setup.
Now, it’s possible things have changed in the last few days, but I wouldn’t really expect them to based on the last time I used windows. I also didn’t know this before I tried looking it up, so I’ll admit I’m a little biased against microsoft.
But the real question is, what documentation are you looking at where you’re pulling all this information from? Can you provide a link?
