If you thought that Microsoft was done with Recall after its catastrophic reveal as the main feature of Copilot+ PCs, you are mistaken.
Microsoft wants to bring it back this October 2024. Good news is that the company plans to introduce it in test builds of the Windows 11 operating system in October. In other words: do not expect the feature to hit stable Windows 11 PCs before 2025 at the earliest.
While Recall may have sounded great on paper and on work-related PCs, users and experts alike expressed concern. Users expressed fears that malware could steal Recall data to know exactly what they did in the past couple of months.
Others did not trust Microsoft to keep the data secure. We suggested to make Recall opt-in, instead of opt-out, to make sure that users knew what they were getting into when enabling it.
Microsoft pulled the Recall feature shortly after its announcement and published information about its future in June. There, Microsoft said that it would make Recall opt-in by default. It also wanted to improve security by enrolling in Windows Hello and other features.
Ah yes, all those IT people were probably thrilled with the prospect of Microsoft getting sent constant screenshots of their employees’ machines, with all those company secrets, sensitive information, and everything
Boy howdy I’m just imagining HIPAA with this.
Also data retention and security it’s a nightmare for Title IX and FERPA as well.
Another thing is Microsoft hasn’t been talking about compression either, how large are these files? What does it do with networked drives? How do we know metadata collection isn’t being expanded?
It never sounded great on paper to me…
The crazy part to me is a local solution (shadow copy) has been around for ever. Why this is even a thing at all is just insane to me.
Shadow copy is a completely different thing. Shadow copy creates snapshots(used for version history, among other uses) of files. Recall is a screen recording software, that includes OCR and maybe some AI stuff. At this time, at least, it too is all local. It just isn’t secure in the least.
And functionaly pointless other then spying on users (and there is also software for that).
My point is, like a lot of things today, this is a solution looking for a problem.
I’m not diagreeing with that. Although it could be useful, I often forget where I saved things, and something that let’s my search my worn history would be rad, but there’s zero chance this won’t be abused by a large list of people, including but not limited to Microsoft, spouses, bosses, malware, governments, every random application, Facebook, and Microsoft.
And is just as useful as a functioning search tool…