Microsoft's new Recall AI will take screenshots of everything you do - freaky [Mircosoft: "capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds"]
Microsoft's new Recall AI will take screenshots of everything you do - freaky [Mircosoft: "capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds"]
This will be preaching to the choir for some readers, as you didn't exactly need another reason not to use Windows right? Microsoft's new Recall AI will take screenshots of everything you do and that sounds truly terrible.
obvious privacy concerns aside, who the hell actually needs this?
If something I do is important enough to remember later, I do save it (bookmark, screenshot, screencast, whatever). This doesn't need to be automated, esp. since it seems to require 25-50 GB of diskspace to do anyway.
For users, this is a solution seeking for a problem. For megacorpo this is just more data harvesting, even if it's "only local" for now. Hard pass, nopety-nope-nope, also arch btw and so forth.
Microsoft needs this.
The OS is no longer your property.
Microsoft is not in the business of providing what users want from their computer.
Permanently Deleted
For my work PC I feel like this could be really handy honestly. If it actually worked. Which AI never reliably does (nor Microsoft for that matter). AI feels like a pyramid scheme to me at this point, I mean this is bad and I get that, I'm just being honest. But I've never been able to get it to do something I actually wanted to that wasn't more than a simple task.
But then all this said, any desire is immediately cancelled when I think about stuff like my work could probably use this to spy on me, and I'm pretty sure this means somebody could spy on my work, so I'm not so sure they'd be super for this tech either.
I also hate every part of this and will turn it off as soon as it shows up.
But in terms of who actually wants this. If an AI assistant were to exist, and if it was actually going to be useful to someone, it would need to know just about everything in your life. At least in theory... In order for an assistant to be useful you would want to be able to ask it "what was Italian restaurant I was thinking of trying" and you would want a response.
I'm not sure this privacy nightmare of an implementation is the correct path to that, but that's roughly what I suspect the desired outcome is.
I would use this constantly, if it is good. My understanding is that it runs locally.
Also Arch is far less functional than windows. I switched back.
The only reason Microsoft can push this as a 'service' now is that 90% of users do not care about, let alone understand any of the technology they use. Doctors, lawyers, CEOs, politicians, even most engineers, have no fucking clue what an operating system is, what "AI" is or why it would be a bad idea to feed 100% of your activity into a black box controlled by a megacorp. And good luck trying to explain to them why something like this might be bad, you need to lay out so much groundwork that by the time you get to training data privacy concerns they have already scrolled though 500 shitposts on TikTok.
It continues to blow me away that these projects get implemented as the only people who can do the work must also understand why it is a bad idea.
It's baffling it's legal to be honest.
Lawmakers literally do not understand why it could be a problem.
Im sure lots of corporations will have a problem with this when they realize all company data is compromised.
It will likely be protected in those cases behind the 365 environment which encloses copilot and prevents training on company data. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/privacy-and-protections
If they listen to their IT department.
Someone yesterday posted the spec requirements for this service and it doesn't appear to be meant for everyday users. It requires massive storage space on a fast SSD and also an NPU (Nueral Processing Unit).
Right, it needs the NPU because the data is stored and processed locally. Guess what, your computer/OS already knows everything you do.
Yet another nothing-burger for the internet to rage about.
I don't use Windows for other reasons, but every useful application I use on a daily basis has some sort of history. Browsers remember pages I've visited, my editor has undo levels, terminal has a searchable scrollback buffer, my shell can recall pretty much every command I've ever run.
And yet none of them work together. I've been thinking about Recall though, and I think the only use case I would have would be to have it summarize my daily activities on a work machine. Quite often I join morning standups, or a standup after a long weekend, and I'm like "wtf did I do yesterday?". I'd love to have an AI remind me I spent 3 hours on Teams dealing with a co-worker's issue, or how long I spent researching something in order to reply to an e-mail.
Or when you notice you have a follow-up meeting on your calendar and you've completely forgotten what the action items you were supposed to handle from the meeting 2 weeks ago.
Basically there's a ton of QOL activities computers could be doing that require some sort of artificial intelligence to index and retrieve in order to be useful. That involves allowing some sort of local AI access to that data, but as long as the crowd of smooth brained luddites keeps whining that goal is getting further away...
Every time I hear something like this it lessens the sting that I felt moving away from Windows. Fuck Microsoft.
No thanks. I'll pass, forever. I never want this. It feels creepy and gross.
Succinct perfection.
Microsoft records every image on screen
Copy protection like widevine, "Am I a joke to you?"
"just show an image of a disney movie on screen and you're okay"
Black screen, can't search for that show on Disney/Netflix you watched and can't remember
I think this may either make me stay on 10 or actively switch over to something free and open source. This is wild, I can't believe people would want this type of "feature". Yeah I can see it being helpful but it is not worth the privacy concerns.
Not to worry. Someone will build a utility that flashes a spreadsheet image for a millisecond every time the system tries to take a snapshot.