This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Windows Recall today: Your data is private and stays on local machine.
Recall after 2 years: We may use your data to train our AI models, improve our services and personalize your experince.
Best part? It's using your hardware and electricity to train the models.
In a few years they'll charge you monthly for the priviledge of using/knowing what it collected on you.
Recall after 2 years: Your personalized ads are generated on device based on preferences detected by Recall and our partners. Recall shares these preferences with Microsoft and our 23,671.5 partners and 16 nation-state partners around the world to better serve you <3.
Pi-hole can block microsoft telemetry domains, just need to keep the blocklists up to date, and flush the Recall cache every day.
Interesting way to put it. The first thing it made me think is that if they did the 2nd part entirely within your PC, would it be ok privacy-wise, and would the consumers be ok with it?
I haven't looked into the current iterations options, but I think I still want the option to turn it off. Personally I'm less concerned with privacy and more concerned with it using up my computers resources.
Even if all the processing remained on my devices, I still wouldn't want or trust it. Microsoft could change that policy at any time, claim something like my logging in to my local account constituted agreeing to their new terms, and expose screenshots of my password manager in an unsecured public data store.
Fuck Windows Recall, and fuck Microsoft generally for being so fucking awful to their customers but mainly fuck them for forcing me to finally make good on my threat to switch to Linux. I've been using Windows for over thirty years and switching off their spyware for ten, but this is the final straw.
I ditched Microsoft on my new build back in Feb. I installed Mint and it's been a really smooth transition for me. I can still do everything I used to, although I know there are some use cases where it's a problem for people. All the games I've tried run well.
But it does give me peace of mind that someone isn't going to change my settings in a way that benefits them in a patch. I feel like I'm working with my OS to get things done instead of wrestling against what some corporate MBA wants.
Fuck Windows Recall, and fuck Microsoft generally for being so fucking awful to their customers
Always has been.
No, there’s a bigger context that you’re not considering: enterprise IT orgs in privacy-sensitive/confidential domains.
This whole feature is an absolute non-starter in biotech, defense, finance, and a bunch of other industries. It’s an infosec nightmare. Legal teams will categorically refuse to allow W11 to be installed simply due to the legal jeopardy it would put their own orgs in, since it implicitly trusts MS with who the fuck knows how much data exactly.
I continue to be shocked and baffled that MS isn’t taking their stance on this product as an “always-on” thing back to the drawing board.
I consult in some companies that don’t even allow copy/paste in outlook. Like, these are actually MS security policies that can be set.
How in all of the actual fucks could they allow MS to see everything on your screen.
I agree with your non starter assessment.
Nah. Even if it's local, I'll burn my CPU cycles on what I want to, thanks. That's like installing a bitcoin miner in your PC and claiming, "But it only runs in the background." Fuck off and buy your own hardware, Microsoft.
Even if the storage were strictly local, there would still be some privacy concerns. Hackers can't steal data that isn't there.
Set up a new pc for someone today. Turned off all the OneDrive backup options. Rebooted and copied their files from a USB to SATA adapter. They turned the backup settings back on again!
Can't trust Microsoft.
Yep. I’ve set up Windows a few times recently, and they don’t give even the slightest consideration for your settings. Few days later, they changed right back.
They will be configured to benefit Microsoft first. Maybe not immediately. But it sounds like a losing game.
You need to make a Powershell script or batch that uninstalls/turns off the feature and then make a scheduled task that runs the ps1/bat at login.
Its insane that this is what you have to do to keep this shit off your system, but it's effective.
I had to do this with New Outlook because it kept reinstalling after Windows updates.
They "trust me" dumb fucks
May not have been Gates that said it, but it embodies an attitude which appears prevalent throughout big business.
Edit: O&O Shut Up is a free tool that helps you easily turn off/disable quite a few of the worst "features" on Windows.
I think that was The Zuck.
You would be correct.
Sure but they are so criminal they turn them right back on in an update.
"You can turn it off", "it's an optional feature", they didn't even last a year! What ever happened to slowly boiling the frog?
The frog is a captive audience
(re)Ditched Windows on my PC a while ago, still have to use Windows at work. Just checked my work laptop running Windows 11 (standard laptop, not a "Copilot+PC") - sure enough, that Recall shit is installed and active. Disabled it, and made a post in our main company Teams channel with screenshots. Will be interesting to see if there are any reactions to this.
To find out if it is active in Windows 11, open up 'cmd' and use: (typing this from memory, hope it is correct)
dism /online /get-featureinfo /featurename:Recall
to disable it, you need a 'cmd' instance with admin rights:
dism /online /disable-feature /featurename:Recall
It will be re-enabled after update : )
Mentioned this in another comment. Take that second dism line, and put it in a batch script and make it a scheduled task that runs at login. Or use a Powershell script to make it a little smarter - check if it's enabled first and then disable it if it is.
Modern problems require modern solutions.
My company blocks screenshots (luckily we don't have high definition cameras in or pocket at all times, else that would seem stupid) so I'm wondering what they will do if those are user accessible.
So wait, did I miss a step or is this NOT the recall feature they announced for Copilot Plus PCs? None of the screen snapshots, none of the AI search.
As far as I can tell it's some variation on the logging search that was in Windows in Win8, right? At least when it comes to user-facing functionality.
EDIT: As far as I can tell, people mentioning this mean the full Recall feature, but even though the package shows up on my Copilot+ PC the functionality itself is nowhere to be seen. I'm still confused about this and relatively convinced something is being missed somewhere.
I've found it very interesting. So far as I can tell it's installed and enabled (even on non co-pilot PCs). However I have yet to see or hear of anyone that has found evidence that it is actually running and doing its job (capturing screenshots and creating the database for the AI model).
To me, the fact it's installed and enabled and they've not stood up by now and said "Ooops our bad, it was only meant to be on copilot PCs and we should have added it to the features menu so you can turn it off" just suggests that, the stuff is there and at some point they will flip a switch on ALL PCs to enable it.
It's quite lucky that a week or so ago when I got some new SSDs, I put aside 2TB for a linux boot to replace my old broken previous linux dual boot. Not booted into windows in over a week.
Switched back to Linux this week and I couldn't be happier.
Upgraded*
Switching to linux few years back is really fucking printing...
I was spending so much time cleaning up windows and then microshit would roll my settings back🤡
For FUCK sakes....
I have a 256GB SATA SSD machine here, that I want to put a fresh install of windows on a 1TB M.2
And NOW is the fucking time windows puts out this fucking Win11 24H2 garbage... that's BSOD'ing peoples computers, having other issues, and now this.
Saw this bullshit coming, already got a linux mint dual boot setup on my work pc.
PSA: If you have a bigger usb formatted to the ntfs file system, consider switching it to exfat file system when working with linux. I had a hard freeze up and couldn’t get my files off for a bit, and this what I suspect was the issue.
