Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published today to the company’s original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn’t elaborate further on specific changes it’s making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June.
For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the OCR text and the screenshots to a giant searchable database on your PC. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to help users retrace their steps and dig up information about things they had used their PCs to find or do in the past.
The problem was that other users on the same PC, or attackers with physical or remote access to your PC, could easily access, view, and export those screenshots and the OCR database since none of the information was encrypted at rest or protected in any substantive way.
Among the changes Microsoft has said it will make: The database will be encrypted at rest and will require authentication (and periodic reauthentication) with Windows Hello before users will be allowed to access it. The feature will also be off by default, whereas the original plan was to turn it on by default and make users go into Settings to turn it off.
Guys guys, I think you’re exaggerating a bit with this feature.
I mean, what’s so bad in it to be hated like this?
Whatever is so wrong in giving a company known for their awful privacy respect and incredibly high data collection they do on the computes a history of literally everything you do on your pc, key presses included?
It’s encrypted! They surely won’t be able to do anything with it, right?
…
Right???
Edit: typo
Last I knew it wasn’t even encrypted, unless they realized how stupid that was
So do they like plan to do something with the massive amount of hospitals using Windows?
Like it seems to me that scraping PHI might be a bad idea
Yes. They plan that all the HIPAA lawsuits they’ll fight off will cost less than all the money they’ll make from selling everyone’s private data
For those who want to escape this bullshit, Linux welcomed you with open arms and gives you control of your PC. Microsoft doesn’t respect you, ditch them and move to something that will.
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Yeah, like OneDrive which was supposed to be off by default, Skype which was supposed to be off by default. They love their “Off by defaults” , because for the first few updates they’re off and then suddenly during a major update you have 20 new processes running because they all have services that run even if the program’s off
Whoops, somehow it got turned on again 🤷♂️
Unless they intend on rolling this into home only there will have to be a policy to allow you to disable it from a corporate standpoint.
Less voicy people will be left actually running windows.
I’m a fan of powerful assistive solutions, but I’m not comfortable with something closed source and proprietary running this intimately.
You will be assimilated.
It’s like Microsoft doesn’t want people to upgrade to Windows 11.
So they fixed the major issues that people were complaining about. Let’s see if people therefore stop complaining.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
“They put more spyware in your OS but it’s not turned on yet, stop complaining.”
It’s Microsoft, there’s always something to complain about.
Not much incentive for them to try to satisfy the complainers, then.
They don’t need to satisfy the complainers, since they wouldn’t be paying for Windows anyways. They need to satisfy their corporate partners who will be paying Microsoft for Pro licenses and yearly Office 365 subscriptions.
They dont care about Windows users corporate or otherwise. They care about their shareholders and the bonus pay. They make the most money by charging rent for everything. They make the most money of cloud and they steal your content to improve their products and services making them more money.
It seems to me that the major issue people were complaining about was the thing even existing in the first place (and rightly so). So by them still wanting to implement it, they have fixed absolutely nothing.
So now it’s basically people who aren’t going to use this tool complaining that other people who do want to use this tool will get to use it.
They fixed the most egregious oversights.
People still don’t like the fact that there’s built in functionality to so egregiously spy on your users.
Is it not opt I’m automatically this time?
Nope, it’s disabled by default.
For now
They always keep trying again until we forget about it and it sticks forever
I saw a comment back when they announced they were “canceling” it, saying the same thing. It seems they were right. Microsoft will do anything to get their grubby hands on as much user data as possible; of course they’re not going to give up that easily.
Remember how Microsoft went to court way back in the day over monopolistic practices? Yeah whatever happened to that…
That’s the strategy, yes
They should call it total recall and get Arnold Schwarzenegger to promote it.
None of these companies invent things for the user anymore. It’s all tracking.
In case anyone has to use Windows for certain things like I do,
HERE is a link that will provide ways to turn off Windows bullshit until you can either move over to Linux full time, or at least make your Windows partition slightly better.
Dude nice
I stupid. Is there somewhere that says everything this does?
You’re not stupid! I think they have a dedicated user guide that explains what the options do. You can also see what they do when you run the PowerShell command, and hover over one of the tweaks.
Can’t get me this time! Between last time and this time, I successfully removed Windows from all PCs in my life.
Microsoft should permanently recall the Recall feature.
Try permanently recall the c suite
The headlines write themselves.
