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?
First there was advertising in Windows 11, now an inbuilt function that is a key-logger?
The EU will have a feast on this arrogance and Corporates will, IMHO, not want to use an OS that is so intrusive
Can’t use it, wouldn’t if I could.
“Microsoft has added options to disallow the capturing of specific apps or websites. Some of these are only available in Edge.”
You know these will be allowed by defualt and the options to disallow them buried several layers deep in the settings.
It’s like they have no idea how or what people are using their computers for. Privacy nightmare? Worse. The whole OS has turned into some microsoft account hippie commune where we’re all happy together sharing our lives and everything is just pillows and soft clouds all over. The great God Redmondo will take care of us all while we’re all baked out of our minds on AI acid, floating in a sea of fluffy ads. Windows 11 is getting so woke it’s just beyond ridiculous at this point. This is not an operating system, this is digital Jonestown.
It’s weird how some conservative folks will blame everything on progressive or some ideology like being “woke”.
I don’t see the connection here.
I do see the obvious privacy issues. I do not like the many ads and the inability to turn telemetry off (Though, thankfully, one can turn off 99% of the ads if one takes the time to fiddle around in settings and so forth). I don’t think Microsoft is perfect by any means.
However, being woke is like waking up to understand that African-Americans have been systematically oppressed from colonial times up to the present, which maybe one didn’t notice or see before in a big picture kind of way. Now, you may not agree with that particular point of view, but I don’t see how Microsoft shoving AI down our throats has any left vs. right political or cultural implications.
The OS doesn’t boot up with Al Gore giving a speech of global climate change or something.
It seems pretty politically neutral to me.
I don’t use their built in news aggregator (Turned off in settings), but, I guess ironically, I run into a lot of MSN (Microsoft Network) news articles when searching for articles on Duck.com and they seem to reprint articles from all sorts of publications, including conservative ones like the Wall-Street Journal. They have some stuff that some might categorize as liberal, but not any further to the left than the right-wing stuff is to the right.
If I had to categorize Microsoft based on those articles, I’d say that they might overall have a defacto centrist point of view. Their only bias seems to be against the most extreme sites on both sides and, actually, there are some left leaning sites they do not include even though they are no more left than others are right. I think there is also a bias towards established news operations and objective journalism.
If I felt like it was an operating system’s place to push news articles (Which I don’t), I’d say that largely the approach they seem to take, as I described it, makes good sense for an OS that almost everyone of all political persuasions uses (Granted, some people are Mac-only, Linux-only, or don’t have a computer, but, in the US at least, it’s got to be over 80% of households have a Windows computer or device in them. Probably more.).
I’m just extrapolating based on what I come across online in my web browser, though. I don’t actually see news articles displayed by the OS, and I don’t want to.
I guess if almosf all news sites put themselves behind pay
walls that couldn’t be easily be worked around, then there would be some value in free news built into an OS. Even then, I’d be kind of like “Couldn’t they just operate a free news website that’s separate from Windows?”, but maybe it’d be a perk specifically for Windows users in that kind of world. In today’s world, I find this kind of stuff encroaching on the operating system a net negative (Not because of political bias, because it’s not the OS’ role), but if things go a certain way like the above scenario, that could change. In a hypothetical future world where almost all news must be paid for, Microsoft offering free news might be the only text news some people can afford and, even for those who could afford a subscription to their favorite news source, having an extra news source for free might be a bonus.
I suppose I get all the criticisms you made and agree with some of them. I just don’t agree with the idea that they are all hippies out there with some sort of a leftwing bias. I just don’t see it.
Is it because their current CEO is Indian-American man (I think, anyway. His ancestors could have been from an ethnically similar nearby country like Bangledesh or Pakistan, both of which used to be part of India.)? Because the two people before him were white males. They’ve never had a woman as CEO.
I don’t think Microsoft has racist hiring policies, but they also don’t seem to bend over backwards to be diverse, at least at the top levels.
The previous commentator was right about Microsoft being woke, but this evil is not in the Windows division for now. Microsoft gaming division (formerly Xbox) is even more woke than Disney. That’s why Microsoft is the most hated company in gaming after Ubisoft and EA, of course. And those woke orders are coming directly from Microsoft top management.
You can not blame people for hating Microsoft. Its increasing anti-consumer practices on Windows division and woke practices in Entertainment division create a toxic mix of distrust and rejection from consumers. People feel that they have to “tame” Windows before it can be safe to use. This is not normal. This is not the 1990s. We all on these forums are relatively tech-savvy enough to use computers with ease and more. The fact that we do not feel safe with Windows is not our problem. It’s Microsoft problem that they have created.
It would have been a nice feature if you could trust Microsoft to keep its word. I am sure that Microsoft will use it for targeting advertisements in next year. And if nobody will object, your private info will be sold to some data broker (with minimal anonymization) in two-tree years.