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Recall is an upcoming AI feature of Windows 11. It takes captures of the screen every five seconds and saves them on the local system. Users may then interact with AI to look up information or process data that has been captured.

Most current Windows 11 PCs won’t get Recall functionality, as a Copilot+ PC is required. These PCs have specific requirements that include a neural processing unit and 16 GB of RAM.

The first iteration of Recall will only be available for specific Snapdragon ARM processors on top of that. With time, Recall will become available for AMD and Intel PCs as well.

Recall Criticism

Windows 11’s Recall feature is not without criticism. Here are the main points:

• It records a user’s entire activity on the Windows PC, with a few exceptions. This makes it the holy grail for law enforcement, spammers, malicious actors, advertisers and marketers.
• Recall snapshots require lots of storage. The default is 25 GB on a 256 GB hard drive. While you can drop that to 10 GB, it is still a lot of space. On 1 TB+ drives, the default is 150 GB of storage.

Disabling Recall in Windows 11

There are three options to disable Recall on PCs that support it.

• Via the Settings app.
• Via the Group Policy Editor.
• Via the Registry (not yet available)

Settings app

1. Open the Start menu and select Settings.
2. Go to Privacy & security > Recall and snapshots.
3. Toggle Save snapshots to off.

This is all to it. Recall is disabled from that moment on for that user account.

Turn off Recall in the Group Policy Editor

Note: The Group Policy Editor is only available in Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise, and Education editions. Home systems may disable Recall in the Registry, which is explained in the next section.

1. Open the Start menu.
2. Type gpedit.msc and press the Enter-key to load the Group Policy Editor.
3. Use the hierarchy on the left to go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows AI.
4. Double-click on Turn off Saving Snapshots for Windows.
5. Change the statues from Not Configured to Disabled.
6. Restart the PC.

Disable Recall in the Registry

Information not yet available, will update once it becomes available.

A lot has been written about the upcoming Recall feature of Windows 11 version 24H2. Reserved exclusively for Copilot+ PCs, it will be unavailable to the majority of users who upgrade their Windows 11 PCs to the new version.

Recall, in a nutshell, takes frequent captures of the entire screen and stores them encrypted on the local system. Windows 11 users may then invoke the Recall feature to interact with the saved content.

From searching for specific information over getting summaries of watched videos or telecalls to finding that specific asparagus recipe that you looked at some time ago in Edge.

It is a proactive feature, unlike Copilot’s rewrite feature and others.

Microsoft describes Recall in the following way:

Search across time to find the content you need. Then, re-engage with it. With Recall, you have an explorable timeline of your PC’s past. Just describe how you remember it and Recall will retrieve the moment you saw it. Any photo, link, or message can be a fresh point to continue from. As you use your PC, Recall takes snapshots of your screen. Snapshots are taken every five seconds while content on the screen is different from the previous snapshot.

How Recall works

You use natural language to find something and Recall returns the information separated into text and visual matches.

Recall is shown as an icon on the Windows 11 taskbar and it may also be started using the keyboard shortcut Windows-J.

Recall displays a timeline on start that you may use to check out a specific day. Recall loads and displays the snapshots of that particular day then, allowing you to interact with the content.

Search is the heart of recall. You use natural language to find or interact with the saved content.

Type what you are looking for and Recall returns any matching snapshot. The AI feature displays hits from all apps by default, but you can filter results by a specific app to narrow down the results.

The feature distinguishes between close and related matches:

• Close matches — includes at least one of the search terms or images that represent the search term.
• Related matches — displays related items, e.g., cannelloni results when you searched for goat cheese pizza.

Selecting a screenshot launches the Screenray feature. Microsoft says that Screenray anayzes the snapshot and enables interactions with elements of it.

The company writes:

What you can do with each element changes based on what kind of content screenray detects. If you select a picture in the snapshot, you can copy, edit with your default .jpeg app such as Photos, or send it to another app like the Snipping Tool or Paint. When you highlight text with screenray, you can open it in a text editor or copy it.

Is Recall a privacy nightmare?

Recall records most activity on a Windows PC when it is active. It is up to the user to enable or disable Recall.

Microsoft has added options to disallow the capturing of specific apps or websites. Some of these are only available in Edge.

Recall does not capture private browsing sessions in Chromium-based browsers. In Edge, the feature may furthermore block captures of specific websites.

In other words, if you use a different browser than Edge, website filtering won’t work. If you use Firefox or another non-Chromium-based browser, everything will get recorded.

Recall runs locally only according to Microsoft. Captures are stored locally and the OCR feature runs local as well only.

The main privacy concerns

Recall runs locally only. The main concern that some users have is that someone else may gain access to the recorded data.

There are several scenarios where this may happen:

• Malware infections may gain access to the data. This gives threat actors access to a user’s entire activity on the PC. It may include information about financial services they use, online accounts, password managers or security software, and confidential information in Word or Excel.
• Law enforcement, including border agents, may want access to the information as it highlights (most of) the activity of a user on the Windows 11 device. Users may be coerced into giving state representatives access to their Windows PCs.

It is your choice

You may or may not use Recall. Most Windows 11 users cannot even use it, as their PCs do not meet the minimum system requirements.

If your PC supports it, you may want to ask yourself a simple question: do I really need it? Is it improving may workflows or helping me in another way?

It is a novelty feature, but how often will you make use of it once that novelty factor wanes off?

If you ask me, I won’t make use of it. All my PCs are not Copilot+ PCs and even if they were, I would turn it off as I do not need it. I know where to look when need to find something.

For businesses, it may play a bigger role. Making everything searchable, including video calls and presentations, is certainly useful in some scenarios.

What about you? Will you use the Recall feature when it comes out?