New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC

I've seen this movie before. They will make it enabled by default and make it difficult to disable. Then a few years later someone will figure out that this data that was supposed to be "private and encrypted" was being sent out to Microsoft, who will get a slap on the wrist, half assedly apologize and immediately move on to even more anti consumer ways to squeeze more income out of its users for "growth".

Remember when this was considered the behavior of malware?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Linux can run from a USB stick to try it out before committing to a full install.

I left windows because of the ai stuff but I didn't expect it to get this bad. This is literally malware.

I’m going to make a Linux distro that helps you forget everything you did on the computer. “Oh, man. I was drunk last night. Thank god BoxWineOS comes with the Neuralyzer program.”

To use Recall, users will need to purchase one of the new "Copilot Plus PCs" powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, which include the necessary neural processing unit (NPU).

Well, I guess I'm keeping my current notebook for the unforseeable future.

I am really liking Linux Mint more and more . . .

SaaS - Surveillance as a Service

Can I just continue to not sign in to a Microsoft account and be good? Seems like it’s all tied to that

There's a great app for easily turning all of the tracking features off: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

I heard the next version of Windows will ravage your whole family, and the only solution is to immediately wipe all of your computers and install Linux.

It's too late for me, since I hesitated. Bill's already outside. If only I listened to the obnoxious, uninvited, endless evangelism of the Linux userbase!

Woe is us, the users of the evil platform! Woe!!1!

Seems like this will not be a thing in most typical PCs, for the time being, as it requires specific hardware and opt in to a feature.

Not liking how pervasive AI features have become, though.

They were already doing this before AI. Using windows is a bad idea.

Someone will figure out how to turn it off again in fairly short order (it might be as simple as a mklink to NUL for the storage directory, causing it to send its recordings into the void). What irritates me more is the typical Microsoft misuse of the word "feature".

(I mean, this thing does have some potential uses (imagine being able to see what that elderly relative you provide tech support for actually did when they claim they "did nothing"), but the privacy concerns vastly outweigh them.)

The thing that annoys me with this kind of thing is that there’s so much tech like this that COULD be really useful if we had absolutely any trust in Microsoft and big tech at all.

Like… data, data collection, ai, and big data could be so useful for general users, but instead of creating useful ui and features for users, they only suck up all our data to build nice charts for advertisers and feed all our data to ai that can help them train their advertising models to try and extract more money from us.

Everyone knows Microsoft is going to wait a bit for the seeds to sprout and harvest all that data.

What an amazing feature!

For Microsoft...

"Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds,"

Seems like a lot of extra disk thrashing that would shorten the life expectancy of an SSD? Like it would be considerably more than your usual background chatter of daemons writing to log files and what not. Unless I'm misunderstanding this?

It's funny. Security folks say how insecure Windows XP is, and how it becomes compromised within seconds/minutes of having an internet connection. It's like Microsoft took that as a playbook challenge to repeat as an OOTB feature, instead of waiting for malware to do it.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC.

To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research.

By performing a Recall action, users can access a snapshot from a specific time period, providing context for the event or moment they are searching for.

For example, someone with access to your Windows account could potentially use Recall to see everything you've been doing recently on your PC, which might extend beyond the embarrassing implications of pornography viewing and actually threaten the lives of journalists or perceived enemies of the state.

Despite the privacy concerns, Microsoft says that the Recall index remains local and private on-device, encrypted in a way that is linked to a particular user's account.

To use Recall, users will need to purchase one of the new "Copilot Plus PCs" powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, which include the necessary neural processing unit (NPU).

The original article contains 596 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I think Microsoft's ultimate goal is to turn your computer into a locked-down console. Infested with data collection malware. And it won't allow third-party apps ever.

My next computer will be a dual-boot machine. I will use Windows ONLY for gaming. No personal info or activity on that partition at all. And I'll use Linux to get sh*t done.

So if it's "AI", and it's remembering what I do on my computer, does that mean it's going to hallucinate about what I did on my computer?

No it doesn't. (My PC runs Linux.)

As long as this is opt-in and users understand the risks, then I don't have a problem with it. I wouldn't use it on my personal PC, but it would probably be handy for my work PC. (Although my organization would probably block the feature for security reasons. So maybe it's not actually that useful after all.)