Microsoft to launch its CoPilot+ without its Recall feature

[thewayne]

After suffering TONS of blowback in the press and industry, Microsoft is pulling the playback feature that took snapshots of what you were doing on your computer and saved them. The issue being that the save was unencrypted and readily accessible to anyone who could sign on to the PC: such as spouse abusers, hackers, etc. Why it was not encrypted from the get go, I don't understand.

Privacy? Who needs privacy! It's nifty! Nifty > privacy!

There were ways to deactivate the Recall feature, how easily it could be turned off is a matter of some debate. Microsoft and other vendors are also infamous for silently turning on things with updates that users had previously turned off.

CoPilot+ goes live June 18. *sigh*

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/microsoft-postpones-windows-recall-after-major-backlash-will-launch-copilot-pcs-without-headlining-ai-feature

https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/06/14/0318213/microsoft-postpones-windows-recall-after-major-backlash

Comments

[acelightning73]

I got that damn CoPilot think in one of my weekly updates. I uninstalled it immmediately. Anything Microsoft says will make your work easier winds up making it unnecessarily complicated and hard to fix.

[thewayne]

What's worse is the next generation of MS Windows keyboards are going to have a Copilot KEY!  I'm sure there will be a hack to disable through Power Toys or something, but we may have to look for it.  I don't mind it being available through Bing Search and will use it on rare occasion, I just don't want it omnipresent and always making 'suggestions' to me.

[acelightning73]

My husband, who has been a programmer for more than 40 years, mostly in Windows environments, is now so fed up with Windows 10's flaws that he's thinking of switching to some other O/S, and I'll have to learn it. I'll think of it as a challenge.

[thewayne]

Lots of people are happy with Mac or Linux, plus Libre Office apps.  Linux, you sometimes end up having to fight drivers, sadly that's still an occasional issue, though increasingly rare.

[acelightning73]

We both got so fed up with Word we switched to Libre Office.

[disneydream06]

It's their world and we are just living in it. :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

That's definitely the way it seems at times.

[silveradept]

They could have listened to a significant part of their consumer base going "please do not foist this on me, please do not give me AI, please do not give me a thing that will make it easier for abusers and hackers to steal my data and the rest." They could have listened a lot earlier than this, and possibly even decided not to do anything at all about it from the outset.

I'm very much of the opinion that unless I absolutely have to, jumping up to Windows 11 is not on my list of things I want to do. Unfortunately, I've only got until October of next year to make my decision about it before 10 goes EoL. I've got a couple of different ways I could keep an 11 install in case I really do need Windows for something, but at this point, with the improvements that Valve keeps dumping into Proton so that games run better on Linux than they have before, it might be possible to actually do the hop completely away from Windows.