Microsoft is gradually rolling out the AI-powered Windows Recall feature to Insiders in the Release Preview channel before making it generally available to all Windows users with Copilot+ PCs.
Recall is an opt-in Windows feature that screenshots active windows every few seconds, analyzes them, and allows Windows 11 users to search text within the snapshots using natural language.
As the Windows Insider Program Team said on Thursday, Recall can be paused whenever needed and will only allow access to the data it captures after authenticating via Windows Hello.
I don’t really understand who this is even aimed at. Anyone who needs to keep records of their work to refer back to already uses some kind of record keeping system such as version control or ticket creation. When I’m doing that I don’t need to keep a record of all of the ancillary actions I’m doing.
Web browsers have history, files can be reverted to previous versions in Windows already, as I said version control software exists (Github is even owned by Microsoft) and there is already software such as Shadow play.
Who exactly is going to be using Recall that doesn’t already have a perfectly good, and actually dedicated, solution in place?
Alternative title:
Windows users start final Linux testing before rollout
I’m kind of tempted to keep using Windows just to remove these features as a big middle finger to MS.
Shrinking their market share is a much bigger middle finger. If you use their product and shut off a bunch of features, you’re still using the rest of their product and its other features.
No worries, I also started test driving Linux a month ago in preparation for when Windows 10 stops being officially supported.
I thought the people called Microsoft on their bullshit, Microsoft then listened and decided to stop pursuing AI proliferation? No?
No, no ,no. You roll out a wildly overreaching implementation so everyone one is upset, that way you can release a just mostly overreaching version and everyone thinks it’s better than what you tried last time.
It’s not even just about shoving AI into everything. That would be bad enough but this feature is literally useless, and it isn’t as if Microsoft doesn’t have a plethora of other features people want them to work on.
How about inventing Windows airdrop? Or spend some time unifying the UI so it doesn’t all look like it was developed by two separate teams working independently. Nah, let’s just build some spy software.
Hell I’d even accept them spending some time making a non-shit version of Teams
I love how no matter how much the market makes it explicitly clear that an idea is absolutely terrible, Microsoft will just be like, “we’re doing it anyway, fuck you.” The best argument for Linux is just to gesture vaguely at Windows.
Is now, always has been, and always will be a bad idea, a security nightmare, and of benefit only to M$ and its so-called “AI” offerings…
Should be permanently disabled on all systems, particularly on corporate systems.
🙄 🤡
Hey gamers: try bazzite Linux and you won’t ever have to worry about this. Try bringing one old machine over as a test and you’ll see for yourself.
I got it running in an afternoon recently. It reads all your windows docs off an external backup. The desktop version really can be a daily driver. The update script is a single click. Genuinely worth considering if you want at least some of your computer usage to not be recorded 24/7.
Sadly, it still has a lot of rough edges for an average computer user. Quite a few games do not work out of the box, and require some setting up
‘opt in’
Yeeeaa i don’t believe that for one damned minute.
It’s opt-in in the same way the Co-pilot that one day just appeared installed on your computer was opt-in. /s
Oh yes. Next update it will be opt-out. Then they will change the opt-out mechanism while all data will be sent to MS servers.
Of course it is opt in. Why would it not be? Microsoft have opted in automatically on your behalf. Soon you will only be able to opt in, for your convenience, as too many people were accidentally opting out. /s
The more users on Linux, the more commercial software will target it. Can already get Davinci Resolve and Autodesk Maya. Drive traffic to see more
Does it have Linux Recall yet?
OpenRecall, yes.
Windows has had that for a decade.
Yeah I had to google ‘system restore point but for Linux’ haha
Not yet, not enough traffic has been driven. Hang in there.
Imagine paying for a surveillance machine that takes pictures and records everything you do ready to regurgitate it to anyone who asks. The fact that anyone sees this as anything other than dystopian is a bridge to far for me.
Micromanaging bosses dream.
PIP justification dream.
LLM training data.
Employee scoring system.
Android has been doing shit like this for years. It’s a marketing tool more than anything. But there’s a weird tribalism around Android so everyone just forgives it. But when windows does it people suddenly care about privacy.
I’m tired.
Its not like there isn’t a backlash against Android either. There’s a reason why projects like GrapheneOS exist.
As much as everyone seems to hate Recall, I really appreciate it. It was the final push I needed to go to Linux full time. Have been on Linux for 6 months now and can’t imagine going back to windows.
Had me in the first half xD
It was one of the reasons I switched. That and my favorite mod manager is working on a Linux native version. It’s not done yet, but it’s good to play other games from time to time.
Valheim is pretty brutal, but also highly moddable.
Not on my shit they’re not.
I opt-out.
From Windows
My system won’t update for some reason despite all my efforts. Maybe this is not such a bad thing…
