Microsoft’s Windows Recall feature is attracting controversy before even venturing out of preview.
Microsoft said in its FAQs that its snapshotting feature will vacuum up sensitive information: “Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry.”
Mozilla’s Chief Product Officer Steve Teixeira told The Register: "Mozilla is concerned about Windows Recall. From a browser perspective, some data should be saved, and some shouldn’t.
Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor at ESET, noted that while the feature is not on by default, its use “opens up another avenue for criminals to attack.”
Moore warned that “users should be mindful of allowing any content to be analysed by AI algorithms for a better experience.”
Cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont was scathing in his assessment of the technology, writing: “In essence, a keylogger is being baked into Windows as a feature.”
AI expert Gary Marcus was blunter: “F^ck that. I don’t want my computer to spy on everything I ever do.”
As much as I want “Jarvis” OS system, I really don’t want the version made by Microsoft, Google, or, Apple.
I want to be able to talk with my AI PC, but I want secure AI that’s just for me and won’t steal all my data for any Corporations to browse.
I think the would becomes a lonely place if everyone started only talking with their AI friend. And you know that’s what would happen. Humans would isolate from each other ever more.
if everyone started only talking with their AI friend.
This would be super great for the ruling class behind the AI curtain. Your AI pal would compliment and flatter you while guiding you down the corporate cattle chute.
Is this a Black Mirror episode yet?
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To a way you can already do AI audio chat with sillytavern or tavernAI and oobabooga llm in the backend. Its a little setup required but you can find online tutorials. For example from aitrepreneur on YT. It’s not perfect yet, but we’ll get there. It’s already fun to use, I just wish I had a better PC to run with a bigger and newer language model. Now using a recall function, that’s too new, but I’d not surprised if we get that in a few months.
You want something that will never happen.
WTF? You can make your very own private, locally run, AI assistant on a Raspberry PI, and make your own interface with an ESP32. Right now.
Why is this upvoted. It’s a wrong statement. Maybe there’s no recall open source local AI yet but voice chat with AI is already possible without sending your information to anyone else.
Why never? There are already AI models you can run locally on your own machine.
What’s the point of this feature ? If it were not evil, what problem would it solve ? How often do you go to your PC and think “what was that thing I saw but never thought to create a bookmark or save the link/image”.
Even if people use it, it would be for something they missed because they thought it was unimportant or didn’t interest them, which is a very rare use case.
And still it is a highlight feature !
I wonder if it is lack of ideas or lack of commitment to create a good idea , given a technology, when these kinds of useless features are launched.
I can’t think of a single reason why I would need detailed snapshots of everything I did with my own computer.
But I can think of plenty of reasons why corporations, advertisers and governments would want that.
I can’t remember the last time Microsoft Imolemented a good idea into windows other than small UI changes.
Windows 11 has better window shadows than Windows 10. That is literally the only improvement I’ve found
Use case: I remember doing something yesterday about this, but I can’t find the email/document/etc.
But I honestly don’t think the value outweighs the cost, so if I still used Windows, this would absolutely be something that drives me away.
Just do what video game companies do. They have an old game. It runs on old hardware. Some parts of the game feel very outdated in modern day. So they update the graphics, retool some outdated game mechanics, update it’s availability to run modern hardware.
They take 20 year old games, update them, and then sell it back to you at full price as a remaster.
I guess what I’m saying is…forget trying NEW ideas. Just give us Windows XP 2.0 that works on modern hardware with ongoing security updates.
That’s all anyone wants.
The thought of Microsoft remastering XP scares me, you and I both know they’d still be throwing Copilot into it.
I think the problem with big companies like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, etc is that once all the smart & creative people have gone, all you have left are the “line must always go up” business idiots, who have no idea what their company does or how to fix it.
CoPilot is exactly the kind of End-stage, “let’s screw our customers to death” idea the CEOs come up with right before their company implodes.
The reason I know that’s true is because when this stupid idea for CoPilot came up, there were no smart people who immediately said, “do you have any idea what a terrible f*cking plan this is?”
all you have left are the “line must always go up” business idiots, who have no idea what their company does or how to fix it.
boy does this seem to describe google nowadays
This is something that steve jobs talked about in an interview that I cannot find at the moment. Its ironic coming from him, but he was talking about when a company truly begins to die. His theory was that when a company is founded, the people that made and designed the product/service are in positions of power. But as a company grows and lives on they get replaced with marketing people. They dont know how to make anything, but they do have that “line go up” mentality. Instead of making something better, the marketing and sales people find ways to sell worse things. Again, hilarious coming from him but i think he had a point.
I don’t know if it’s really about a breakdown between ‘innovators’ and ‘sales/marketing’, but instead a breakdown between people who sincerely want to deliver something intrinsically valuable versus product delivery being some unfortunate obnoxious means to the end of “more money now”. A company founded from the onset of “don’t care, just make money” will generally fail, and the ones that succeed are the ones that care. Then you move beyond the “founder” generation of a company and then you get to watch the effort get scavenged to pieces.
Whatever may be said of Jobs, he really liked the company and products he was in charge of. Sometimes he would value form over function more than I would like, but it was still at least a facet of the actual product rather than hyper fixation on how to make the profit margins grow without much regard for the product itself. Yes, massive wealth flowed in as they caught the culture just right with iPod and then iPhone, but I don’t think it ever descended to cannibalizing the company to make those numbers even better than they were.
But the C-suite folks think it’s a great new way to spy in their employees, so I’m guessing it’s here to stay.
I bet their lawyers might not think it’s a great idea.
Why? Their company, their computers.
But AI is “somebody else’s computer,” at least that’s how most work. What’s to guarantee that it’s actually local and stays local going forward?
Not that I’m defending it but the data and the model itself on Recall stays all local and encrypted, according to Microsoft. It also says it won’t use it for ad targeting or will sell the data. Of course, the caveat is that is what they are saying right now and may not be saying in the future. We’ve obviously seen strategies where gradually things move down the spectrum as it continuously normalizes.
With MS we’ve seen the “Start” menu advertise Candy Crush forever and then “recommended apps” and it isn’t a far step to show “sponsored recommended apps” and then just “sponsored content” as things continue to become more normal for everyone, especially if its for the “Home” version or whatever. People will just argue to pay whatever for a Pro license.
Going to full blown ads now though? It’ll piss the consumer off. Do it gradually over a decade? There will be some rumblings, sure, but it probably won’t matter. By then they might be able to give you a “free” cloud VDI (with lots ads from the OS) with less ads and CPU/GPU power based on subscription tiers and you just need to buy a cheap $30 thin client and everyone will just be OK with that.
…corporate good will to be on the side of the peoHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Sorry, could say it with a straight face.
Total Recall? Get your ass to Linux!
I’ve tried to get into linux 4 different times now. Over the coarst of 15 years.
I have no idea what I’m doing.
Try BazziteOS
It’s meant for gaming, but I find it’s so feature complete that’s it’s great for non-gaming purposes.
Somehow it even works better on my monitor than Windows, since I can actually control my brightness from an applet rather than having to use my monitor buttons.
This is going to be terrible for work place security.
No one here mentioning this will be a gold mine for Malware makers and hackers.
The actual article does mention it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The user can then scroll through the archive of snapshots to find what were doing some time back, or query an AI system to recall past screenshots by text.
The Windows 11 feature is supposed to eventually expand to allow users to pull up anything that happened recently on their Copilot+ PC and interact with or use it again, as the system logs all app activity, communications, and so on, as well as by-the-second screenshots, to local storage for search and retrieval.
The IT giant also says that for the relatively small number of users running its Edge browser – with a market share of just under 13 percent, according to Statcounter – InPrivate sessions won’t be snapped, nor will DRM content.
Other Chromium-based browsers can filter out private browsing activity but lose the ability to block sensitive websites (such as financial sites) from Recall.
Microsoft did not engage our cooperation on Recall, but we would have loved for that to be the case, which would have enabled us to partner on giving users true agency over their privacy, regardless of the browser they choose."
Industry must consider data protection from the outset and rigorously assess and mitigate risks to people’s rights and freedoms before bringing products to market.
The original article contains 1,057 words, the summary contains 209 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Hopefully this will get more people into looking at Linux as their OS.
It completely depends on their implementation. Apple released Local Snapshots for OSX with Time Machine in 2007. Granted, they’re created hourly rather than every few minutes, but there hasn’t been a vulnerability or exploit as a result of the feature.
