Microsoft retreats on Recall — always-on screenshots will be opt-in

Microsoft has made a big push for its “Copilot+” program, enhancing Windows with new AI powers enabled by the latest processors and NPUs. But one of the headline features, Recall, immediately raised privacy concerns as it demonstrated an ability to essentially record every single action of the user. Microsoft has backed down on its initial claims and introduced new details in the hopes of making users more comfortable.

First, Microsoft’s blog post on the subject reiterates that even on the Windows 11 hardware that’s capable of Copilot+ features, Recall will be entirely optional with the capability to be turned off. Snapshots — screenshots of everything done on the PC — are allegedly stored and encrypted on the local drive, never uploaded to the cloud.

But in response to a wave of negative feedback, there’s a new setup interface for Recall giving you a clear, unavoidable choice to allow or disable screen recordings. That’s on top of the existing options to filter out specific programs from Recall, or simply pause it temporarily or manually delete specific snapshots. In addition to that, Microsoft is making Windows Hello (face or fingerprint scanning) mandatory to use Recall in the first place, with a presence detection check if you want to access your snapshots.

This might go a fair way towards assuaging a few people’s fears over the Recall feature…but as for myself, I’m not even seeing a benefit for how it would affect my computer’s performance, never mind the privacy issues. Windows’ built-in search has been so terrible for so long that I have zero faith in the efficacy of Recall to offer a searchable record of what I’ve done, or at least a record that can reliably find anything I’ve been looking for. My own organization of files and web history is more than enough, and doesn’t require active recording or tens of gigabytes of storage.

Others disagree. Mark Hachman thinks it could be incredibly useful, augmenting one’s own memory with an instant record of all relevant data on your PC. Even so, he highlighted the privacy issues and didn’t see Recall actually fulfill its promise in the demos he was given last month. We’ll have to wait for test builds to hit actual Windows 11 machines before we can try it. I have a feeling security researchers, as well as some people with less scrupulous motivations, will be eager to test out Microsoft’s commitment to security.

Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer