Recall remains a phenomenally bad idea. I don’t understand why anyone would green light it.
It sounds like a great idea if you don’t think too long about it and none else has it yet. People like that don’t care about security or privacy concerns, as long as there is no law against it. Gotta earn money and the competition is fierce.
And with “people” I mean executives just as much as engineers. Gotta earn money fast > being ethically aware of the implications of your work
I guess. I mean I immediately thought “I don’t want it capturing the porn I look at”, but maybe people really don’t think about privacy at all.
I don’t really see how it makes money, since it’s bundled into windows (right?).
It makes money the same way anything like this makes money: selling your data. Maybe it improves ad revenue by giving more relevant ads, or maybe they’ll just outright sell your info.
That said, porn is the least of your worries here, I’m thinking it might scrape sensitive info like social security numbers, bank logins, etc, and an attacker then scrapes Recall to get all of it and now you’re screwed.
I feel like it should be illegal to sell user information like that, but clearly I don’t make the laws.
But yes that’s a good point that stealing bank info is worse than porn preferences. Though the way things are going, looking at gay stuff might be a hazard in some parts of the US.
Man, what a stupid dystopia this is.
I wish the 4A protections also applied to private businesses. We absolutely need a law to that effect.
well of course it does. There is no way for it to know what it is capturing. Best it can do is capture it, and maybe discard it if it manages to detect any sensitive info. Which won’t work every time
Doesn’t surprise me one iota. This is why I will be abandoning Windows next year and moving to Linux and doing the same for my parents.
Same boat! I’ve switched over two of my lesser used devices to Mint already (an old surface tablet and my work laptop), only hesitation is with my gaming machine. Everything has been set up just how I like it so I’m not eager to start from scratch there but once I’m confident and comfortable on my work laptop I’ll make the switch there too
While dual booting into Pop, I can see my Windows SSD and all of its contents. It might make testing a little easier for you!
Running games from the NTFS partition won’t work very well/at all, you’ll want to redownload those to a Linux filesystem.
I was speaking more of any of their applications they were wanting to run through Wine for testing purposes.
I’ve been running games from an NTFS drive through Lutris with no issues.
I’m so mad that I’m going to call customer support, they’re going to look at my social security, phone number, password, whatever in recall, and I don’t have a choice except to not interact with other people on computers.
how in the hell do they think this is going to go over in It for corporate America with sensitive data on everyone’s workstations?? what about the rest of the world ?
This will go over extremely well. (for the CEOs) Management, ignoring all advice by the company’s IT people, will order them to enable Recall to “improve productivity” because one guy on LinkedIn said it made him one quattuordecillion percent more productive, IT will protest but will be inevitably shot down. Everything will be fine for a bit until some attacker inevitably gets into their systems and steals the Recall data from all their active workstations, leading to the compromise of almost every system they have.
They offer their customers 1 free year of credit monitoring, promise to do better, never get punished by the law, rinse and repeat.
Meanwhile, the CEO’s paycheck will never take a hit no matter what they do.
I can’t imagine there’s any way someone with an enterprise license can’t either switch this off or, more likely, capture it internally. Will wait for a windows enterprise admin to confirm or deny.
Well it’s currently opt in for normal users, and yes you can create a group policy to ensure it is disabled on all managed devices.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/manage-recall
No chance they would ever launch this without it being manageable, they would get sued to oblivion by the government pertaining to clearenced information.
They’ll turn it off.
The only way it could possibly censor sensitive information is if it captured it in the first place and then determined that it was in a sensitive category and then censored it. Recall still has to capture it first to make that determination.
I don’t understand why this isn’t everyone’s immediate thought after hearing Microsoft say their system would censor sensitive information. How could it possibly know what to censor without reading it first? Of course it’s going to invade your privacy, and then maybe they’ll selectively delete some of it when you ask them to.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it all gets uploaded to cloud storage first, and then the “sensitive” stuff gets deleted from the local storage only.
PSA - It’s probably gonna capture religious and political affiliations and weird pornography fetishes, too. Lol.
As was mentioned, it’s just a bad idea.
Edit: Here’s a particularly cynical prediction: Joe Consumer angry to learn that Recall backups were used to lower his credit score, and (incorrectly) deny his insurance claim.
Benefits:
- a little better local search?
Downsides:
- identity theft
- more intrusive ads
- loss of insurance coverage
- ruined relationships
- scammers draining bank accounts
Seems reasonable.
The new version of Recall is now opt-in rather than opt-out – I got prompted to enable Recall immediately after installing the Insider Build.
This seems to be the important bit, hopefully it stays opt in.
The Windows 11 migration is mandatory, and there is no lube. They’ll gradually lower the tech requirements as it approaches to minimize people looking for alternatives.
But make no mistake, Microsoft is asserting the leverage of its market share for full enshittification. Linux or Mac or eat the shit they’re giving you.
What is the advantage that this is supposed to provide?
Just make a history tab that shows all the programs I’ve opened and when. I opened them.
Surprised pikachu
This is exactly why I’m, if possible, wanting to remove the WiFi card from my desktop. Hopefully no way for macrohard to force install win11 if I do that and use that one utility that disables automatic updates. Pretty sure if I did this early enough I’d hopefully be safe. Doesn’t make a huge difference when I’m hopefully gonna be updating my desktop before this all goes down, but probably still a good thing to do just in case (especially since I don’t have plans of getting rid of my current desktop).
Are you not planning on using the internet ever again?
At least for that device. If I ever need anything for that device that I don’t already have, I’d be able to download from a different device and transfer it via thumb drive or if I need to and have space, using an external drive.
