Sitting in the audience on Monday as Microsoft unveiled a new Windows 11 feature called Recall, I immediately predicted the reaction we’re seeing around the world right now. But you can skip the Chicken Littles in this case: Recall is an optional preview experience. that will only be available on a small number of PCs this year.
And even if you adopt Recall, everything it does happens only on the device and isn’t synced in any way anywhere else. In fact, the challenge I posed to the designer of the feature was that, on the contrary, it was too limited. For example, if you restart the PC you are recovering on, you will lose all the snapshots you took.
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But we all knew that privacy advocates would promptly trample on this feature without taking the time to understand how it works. To be honest, it doesn’t help that we’re still shocked and dealing with very genuine privacy issues similar to AI and Big Tech data-stealing monsters advancing this field without any respect for ethics or the law. And that Microsoft, the creator of Recall, is in bed with the worst offender, OpenAI. In some cases, suspicions are justified.
But in this case.
A BBC report on Recall is a prime example of how the press tries too hard to appease both sides of a debate, allowing alarmist perspectives to be equated with rational opinions. It’s full of alarming terms: “a privacy nightmare. “”, “a deterrent effect”, “a dystopia”, etc. , which drown out the truths discussed in the same article. All everyone wants is for Microsoft to be enabling a Big Brother feature in Windows 11 that will secretly track their every action, and what?Report all of this to Microsoft? There are no valid considerations raised in this report.
You can find out how Recall works, I don’t know, by researching for 10 seconds.
On Microsoft’s support site, for example, you may be informed that Recall requires very fast PCs, restricting their availability and how to use this feature. But this post mentions that Recall adheres to Microsoft’s faulty AI principles, which is ridiculous and inaccurate.
But it’s ok. An article in Microsoft Learn provides more information, noting that Recall only works with supported (Chromium-based) internet browsers, supports policies that allow organizations to simply turn it off entirely, not save snapshots of InPrivate windows, blocked apps, and blocked internet sites. . , and supports many user-facing settings to clarify which Internet applications and sites can be included in snapshots. Still vague.
However, if you’re really interested in privacy, Microsoft’s article Privacy and control of your callback experience has the information you need. Here, we are informed that you will be asked to allow this feature when installing Windows and you will be able to say no. That you can turn off snapshot saving, temporarily pause app filtering, and delete snapshots at any time. That everything Recall does happens locally on your Copilot PC, which is protected by full-disk encryption, the Pluton security processor, and, if you’re not an idiot, biometric authentication mechanisms that are even more secure with Windows Hello Enhanced Login Security (ESS), a requirement for this type of PC. Et that other users who log on to the PC, even with administrator privileges, can’t access your snapshots. Everything that happens with Microsoft Recall on your Copilot PC stays on your Copilot PC.
So let’s turn our attention to the actual Windows 11 issues. This is one of them.
Paul Thurrott is an award-winning journalist and blogger with 30 years of industry experience and 30 books. He owns Thurrott. com and hosts three technology podcasts: Windows Weekly with Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell, Hands-On Windows, and First Ring Daily with Brad Sams. In the past, he was a Senior Generation Analyst at Windows IT Pro and SuperSite Writer for Windows from 1999 to 2014 and Lead Thurrott. com Dome at BWW Media Group from 2015 to 2023. You can succeed in Paul through email, Twitter, or Mastodon.
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