Stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code — inside the Copilot+ Recall disaster.

It's subpoenable information. Absolutely no one is addressing that aspect.

I've done quite a bit of work in IT within the sphere of investigative law enforcement and this sets off major alarm bells to me.

They OCR the entire screen and store it in plaintext?! There is no way... I know it's Microsoft we're talking about, but are they really this stupid?

Are Microsoft a big, evil company?

A. No, that’s insanely reductive. They’re super smart people, and sometimes super smart people make mistakes. What matters is what they do with knowledge of mistakes.

I have no doubt there are smart employees, but they don't call the shots. Case in point.

The dude set up a strawman argument, then didn't even bother to burn it down properly.

Unpopular Opinion: This is why Microsoft were such assholes about making sure Windows 11 required a modern TPM and this is also why they are forcefully rolling out Bitlocker encryption turned on by default on all Windows 11 PCs.

Is Recall still a fucking stupid idea? Yes, resoundingly so. But they've half-ass considered the risks, it seems. The forceful rollout of Bitlocker is dumb and short-sighted in its own right, and it wouldn't make a person completely secure from outside attacks rooted in a Recall exposure.

I get the security issues, sure, those are valid, but the privacy ones are even worse. Imagine a teenager trying to search information on being gay, or possible intrusive thoughts on their family computer, only for their super maga right wing parent to find it in the screenshots.

Or someone being abused at home and searching for support facilities, deleting history and being outed by recall.

Wait, how about credit card fraud as a result of EVERYONE who has access to this computer can read your cc data?

Or, my husband was looking at jewelry online yesterday and he hasn't told me, he must be cheating, right? Oh sorry, I forgot, our anniversary is next week... Hahahaha, don't be upset babe.

Best one ever though, imagine your search history, your porn watch history accessible to anyone with access to your computer? The fucking horrific existence of having an employer process this data at scale using fancy staff monitoring program 7, and run stats on the fact that you had a toilet break while working from home, and they want to know if it was a number 1, or a number 2 so they can work a mean time to shit metric into your KPA/scorecard.

Guys, whatever benefit you think this is. It's not worth it.

Couldn’t you use a separator to make it one line of code? That way it’d be even more dangerous

As much as I lean to hate this despite it not even affecting me as a Linux user...

I’m going to structure this as a Q&A with myself now, based on comments online

What is that? "I'm going to pretend to ask questions that I'll then answer myself the way I think it'll outrage that most people do I'll get a lot of clicks on this shitty article"? What crappy excuse for content creation is this? I hate it.

Nah…. Just… just nah. This will never fly in enterprise environments

Even supposing I didn't care about the security implications of this, why on earth would I want this functionality? I can barely keep up with all my activities in the present moment, let alone the past. It's like a morbid and pathological unification of nostalgia and hoarding.

THIS IS NOT CURRENTLY RUNNING ON MY WINDOWS COMPUTER, right?

This obvious first question hasn’t been clarified (maybe by one comment in this thread, but not in the article)

I cant believe they are including this in enterprise edition too.

They usually keep their dirty spyware out of the enterprise editions to avoid losing corporate clients who dont want their secrets easily pluckable.

The full article is well worth reading. It's good to find a lucid, logical deconstruction of why, precisely, this will be a complete disaster.

We should have let the government actually break up microsofts monopoly long ago. Now they will abuse it to force millions of Americans to use their spyware.

I'm really hoping valve does a public steamdeck OS release. I'd like to replace windows on my PC with Linux and have windows as a backup, but the Linux distro I'm the most familiar with is the steam deck's distro, and that's not available outside of steam decks yet.

thanks Microsoft

pleasetellmeyoucaninferthesarcasmfromthispost

Microsoft, stop giving me Red Star OS flashbacks. (If im not mistaken, it records your screen and stores it in a police-only folder)

Does anyone yet know how to break stuff like Copilot?

I don't have Win11, but I also never really trust that MS won't surreptiously push this kind of thing in the background to legacy systems, and I don't trust UI toggles within Windows to actually do anything.

Do we know if there are services or files that Co-pilot needs to function?

I keep hearing all the rabble rousing about this from a security perspective, but is there not an incognito mode to the Recall capability?

As reasonable the concerns are... it seems like there's quite a bit of fearmongering over software and hardware that haven't even really gotten into the mainstream yet.

This is a feature hundreds of millions of people will use and very likely won't cause any security issues. These doomsday scenarios every Linux user here is predicting is a bit much, don't you think so?