Microsoft’s controversial AI tool that takes screenshots on PCs will be turned off by default
Microsoft’s upcoming Copilot+ PCs feature AI tools such as Recall, which screenshots users’ activity periodically
Microsoft may be leading the generative artificial intelligence race — but that’s not without some stumbles.
Last month, Microsoft announced its Copilot+ PCs with AI features, including the Recall tool, which takes screenshots of users’ activity periodically. The screenshots are encrypted, stored, and analyzed by AI to “understand their context,” serving as a sort of “photographic memory” for users to remember their PC activity, according to Microsoft. But after privacy and security concerns emerged, Microsoft said Friday that the feature will be off by default.Users will have to enroll in Windows Hello to enable the tool, as well as provide proof of presence to view screenshots in Recall. Microsoft is also “adding additional layers of data protection” such as “just in time” decryption to decrypt Recall screenshots when authenticated users try to access them. Copilot+ PCs are slated to start shipping to customers on June 18.
Kevin Beaumont, a cybersecurity expert who formerly worked with Microsoft, shared a thread on X showing Recall’s potential security flaws. Recall, he found, stored information in a plain-text database, making it possible for attackers to gain access using malware.
Microsoft is “going to deliberately set cybersecurity back a decade & endanger customers by empowering low level criminals,” he wrote. A Microsoft executive addressed criticism by comparing its hurried AI developments to a “journey.”
“We are on a journey to build products and experiences that live up to our company mission to empower people and organizations to achieve more, and are driven by the critical importance of maintaining our customers’ privacy, security and trust,” Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president of Windows and Devices, said in a statement. “As we always do, we will continue to listen to and learn from our customers, including consumers, developers and enterprises, to evolve our experiences in ways that are meaningful to them.”
Microsoft is reportedly facing scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission over potential anticompetitive practices in the AI industry. The company is reportedly already under investigation by the FTC over its deal to “acqui-hire” the AI startup Inflection. In March, Microsoft paid Inflection a $650 million “licensing fee” to use its models, and hired most of the startup’s employees — including its chief executive Mustafa Suleyman, who now heads Microsoft’s AI division.
Microsoft introducing feature where A.I. will record and analyze everything you do on your computer
Microsoft recently announced a new feature coming to Windows that records and analyzes everything you do on your computer and feeds it to A.I.
Seriously, does anybody want something like this?According to Ars Technica, Microsoft says this will be a way to “retrace your steps” on your computer, and will allow you to flip through EVERYTHING you’ve done, including your messages, inside apps, and even within video conferencing.
Microsoft says the data is encrypted only on your hard drive and can be deleted at any time, but we all should know that once something is on the internet, it’s there forever! source
MICROSOFT ANNOUNCES FEATURE THAT RECORDS EVERYTHING YOU DO ON YOUR COMPUTER FOR AI
WHY WOULD ANYONE EVEN WANT THIS?
Total Recall
Microsoft has just unveiled a forthcoming Windows AI feature to help users “recall” all their past activities — by recording everything they do in real-time.
As Microsoft explains on its website, the feature — which is called “Recall” and is still being tested — takes “images of your active screen every few seconds.”
“The snapshots are encrypted and saved on your PC’s hard drive,” the description continues. “You can use Recall to locate the content you have viewed on your PC using search or on a timeline bar that allows you to scroll through your snapshots.”
This functionality, as Ars Technica explains, extends beyond mere snapshots of your screen to include on-demand transcription and translation of video meetings and can show provide context for what they were doing during a given moment.
In other words, it sounds a lot like “Big Brother” for the small screen.
Privacy Policy
While Microsoft insists the features will be stored and encrypted locally on one’s own hard drive, there’s nothing stopping a bad actor who has gained access to a given PC from watching and saving everything a Recall user has done. As Ars points out, the privacy implications of this blow past being worried about one’s porn browsing habits being watched and into safety issues, be it for journalists or political dissidents deemed enemies of the state or abused people who share their computers with their abusers.
In attempts to assuage some of those concerns, the company appears to have taken extra steps to keep Recall information locked down and private to users.
“Recall screenshots are only linked to a specific user profile and Recall does not share them with other users, make them available for Microsoft to view, or use them for targeting advertisements,” the company wrote on its website. “Screenshots are only available to the person whose profile was used to sign in to the device.”
This is not, as Ars adds, the first time Microsoft has tried this sort of thing, either.
Windows 10, for instance, included a feature called “Timeline,” which allowed users to scroll through historic documents, browser tabs, and applications from both PCs and Android phones when toggling between tasks. Timeline, however, didn’t take its snapshots spontaneously, and was discontinued in 2021.
Lucky for unwitting purchasers of Microsoft’s AI-enabled Copilot+ PCs, Recall is still in beta testing, so it won’t be unleashed on them anytime soon.
Nevertheless, it sets a scary precedent to introduce this kind of AI feature given that data privacy issues are too often overlooked in favor of the far-sexier prospect of AGI. source
New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC
Recall uses AI features “to take images of your active screen every few seconds.”
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. Despite encryption and local storage, the new feature raises privacy concerns for certain Windows users.”Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds,” Microsoft says on its website. “The snapshots are encrypted and saved on your PC’s hard drive. You can use Recall to locate the content you have viewed on your PC using search or on a timeline bar that allows you to scroll through your snapshots.”
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. It also allows users to search through teleconference meetings they’ve participated in and videos watched using an AI-powered feature that transcribes and translates speech.
At first glance, the Recall feature seems like it may set the stage for potential gross violations of user privacy. Despite reassurances from Microsoft, that impression persists for second and third glances as well. 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. “Recall screenshots are only linked to a specific user profile and Recall does not share them with other users, make them available for Microsoft to view, or use them for targeting advertisements. Screenshots are only available to the person whose profile was used to sign in to the device,” Microsoft says.
Users can pause, stop, or delete captured content and can exclude specific apps or websites. Recall won’t take snapshots of InPrivate web browsing sessions in Microsoft Edge or DRM-protected content. However, Recall won’t actively hide sensitive information like passwords and financial account numbers that appear on-screen.
Microsoft previously explored a somewhat similar functionality with the Timeline feature in Windows 10, which the company discontinued in 2021, but it didn’t take continuous snapshots. Recall also shares some obvious similarities to Rewind, a third-party app for Mac we covered in 2022 that logs user activities for later playback.
As you might imagine, all this snapshot recording comes at a hardware penalty. 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). There are also minimum storage requirements for running Recall, with a minimum of 256GB of hard drive space and 50GB of available space. The default allocation for Recall on a 256GB device is 25GB, which can store approximately three months of snapshots. Users can adjust the allocation in their PC settings, with old snapshots being deleted once the allocated storage is full.
As far as availability goes, Microsoft says that Recall is still undergoing testing. “Recall is currently in preview status,” Microsoft says on its website. “During this phase, we will collect customer feedback, develop more controls for enterprise customers to manage and govern Recall data, and improve the overall experience for users.” source
Windows 11 Recall AI feature will record everything you do on your PC
Microsoft has announced a new AI-powered feature for Windows 11 called ‘Recall,’ which records everything you do on your PC and lets you search through your historical activities.
Recall works like a photographic memory for your PC, letting you access everything you’ve seen or done on your computer in an organized way using queries in your native language.
With Recall, you can scroll through your timeline to find content from any app, website, or document you had opened. The feature utilizes snapshots to suggest actions based on what it recognizes, making it easy to return to specific emails in Outlook or the right chat in Teams.
To use Recall on Windows, you’ll need a Copilot+ PC that supports 40 TOPs NPU, a Snapdragon X chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.
Recall works by taking screenshots of your active window every few seconds, building snapshots of what you do over time. Microsoft says the feature will require at least a 256 GB hard drive with 50 GB of space available to store approximately three months of snapshots, but this can be increased by allocating more storage.
The Recall snapshots are analyzed by the NPU on Copilot+ PCs and an AI model to extract information from screenshots that is then added to a new Windows semantic index. Microsoft says all of this data is encrypted with Bitlocker encryption tied to the user’s account and is not shared with other users on the same device.
This semantic index allows users to search for information using human language queries and pull up snapshots related to the query. In these snapshots, information, such as URLs, text, and images, can be interacted with, making it easier to find and use historical information.
Microsoft says the feature will roll out in June with support for only some languages, which will be English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. More languages will be added in the future.
You can control what information and apps Recall can capture, and Microsoft says the AI works at the hardware level and keeps all data stored locally, never shared with the cloud or Microsoft.
“Recall leverages your personal semantic index, built and stored entirely on your device,” reads a new announcement from Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi.
“Your snapshots are yours; they stay locally on your PC. You can delete individual snapshots, adjust and delete ranges of time in Settings, or pause at any point right from the icon in the System Tray on your Taskbar.”
“You can also filter apps and websites from ever being saved. You are always in control with privacy you can trust.”
While Microsoft states that no data will be sent to their servers, one concern immediately comes to mind with this feature: how this recorded data will be locally secured on Windows devices.
If a threat actor gains local access to a device, would they be able to access this data or send it to their own computers to analyze the information offline for sensitive data.
Furthermore, Microsoft admits that the feature performs no content moderation, meaning it will screenshot everything it sees in active windows, including credentials, banking information, and other confidential information.
Only Microsoft Edge’s InPrivate windows and content protected by DRM will be excluded from Recall by default.
BleepingComputer contacted Microsoft about whether other browsers’ private browsing features would be excluded and whether the Recall data would be secured if a device is breached. We will update our story if we receive a response. source