Microsoft's AI Recall feature slowly moving towards release. Again.

[thewayne]

It's moving back into the beta preview builds, which means they're hoping for a public release in coming months.

As if we need a reminder, here's some reasons as to why it's bad.

1. It will eat approximately 15% of your TOTAL disk space.
2. If you're running a solid-state disk, it will increase your disk wear. This means your disk will fail sooner than it should. This is not as problematic as your traditional spinning rust hard drive.
3. Increased CPU use, possibly laggier system. We don't know how much CPU resource it will use IRL.
4. While it is theoretically secured behind your login, we don't know how secure it is. The last time around for it, it was capturing banking information, medical info, SSNs, etc.
5. We don't know if it might be reporting things upstream to someone. Guaranteed that once it gets into the beta program, much less general release, there will be privacy and security boffins who will be watching their firewall logs for what activity it is generating.

I expect we can anticipate further privacy issues with this thing on-going. And if you're not running it, and you send sensitive or confidential information to someone who is running it, well, your information will be hoovered up by their system.

Broadly speaking, it's probably not a good idea for a lot of people. I certainly do not recommend it. The article has recommendations on how to disable it, I don't think we have solid information on how to uninstall it at this time since it is not an actual released feature yet.

https://gizmodo.com/windows-controversial-recall-is-back-heres-how-to-control-it-2000589002

Comments

[disneydream06]

Is it not an option?
Does it just enter your computer? :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

It's likely to be part of a Windows 11 Feature Update, so it'll install itself.  There will be ways to turn it off, which I will detail when it comes to town, whenever that is.  Knowing MS, it might turn itself on automatically - they tend to do that.

[disneydream06]

UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[moonhare]

I never heard of this program before. It will be interesting to see how it actually works.

[thewayne]

I'm surprised!  It's been talked about before, and I'm pretty sure I've discussed it here in my blog.  But it's been pulled back from release at least twice, thus hasn't been in the news for a while: almost a year, I believe.

[mtbc]

I've wondered things like how safe (or not) people are from Google hoovering up everything e-mailed to a user whose domain is handled by Google.

[thewayne]

While I have Gmail accounts, I don't use them for personal correspondence.  When you get down to it, there's very little information privacy out there once you start using the internet.

[devilc]

Work has us running W11 on 256gig disks, so it's doubtful it will even fit on, given the tight squeeze we're already under for W11 + programs, and given that we deal with sensitive data? We cannot have an "AI" logging it all to sell.

I'm wondering how this is all going to shake out.

[thewayne]

That's a crazy small hard drive.  I remember when I was at the police department in the '90s and we were trying to run Windows 3 and Office on 30 and 40 meg hard drives.  Yeah, Recall is going to be a big problem for libraries, IT depts are going to have to be on their toes to kill it good.

[silveradept]

This is Microsoft at their usual - introduced a bad idea, got roundly told off that it was a bad idea, got roundly told off that their implementation of a bad idea was leaky and terrible, but instead of deciding that it was a bad idea, they just waited for the heat to die down and then reintroduced it. Must be far too many financial incentives to keep going with the bad idea instead of saving whatever dignity they could by killing it entirely.

[thewayne]

Things are a little weird at MS right now.  They're backing away from a lot of data center construction, though maintaining lease rights on the land, because they have their doubts about AI as it stands right now.  Seems to me that Recall is their toe-hold into training AI if they can leverage it and get people to opt in.

[silveradept]

I suspect they'll be able to do it, first from the early-adopters and then slowly squeezing the rest of people into "opting-in" because there's some other thing they have to have that's part of Windows that's now been tied to allowing Recall to pilfer your data.