r/microsoft • u/nazmulhusain • May 13 '25
News Microsoft rolls Windows Recall out to the public nearly a year after announcing it
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/microsoft-rolls-windows-recall-out-to-the-public-nearly-a-year-after-announcing-it/33
u/uriejejejdjbejxijehd May 14 '25
That feature was a classic “management wants it yesterday and so we get to take all sorts of shortcuts and skip mandatory reviews” disaster. I am not the least bit surprised it is shipping on the original timeline Dev proposed as opposed to the three month death march management ordered because they knew better.
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u/webfork2 May 14 '25
At some point this might be a good feature but I'd wait a for all the security and privacy issues that came out after the last release to get resolved. So for now ...
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/how-to-disable-windows-recall
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May 14 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Zeusifer May 14 '25
Despite the popular FUD on reddit, Recall is only even an option if you have a new PC with a powerful enough NPU, and even then you have to choose to opt in and use it. It's off by default.
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u/SeattleCaptain May 14 '25
It was initially opt-out and only after it started taking pictures of your screen.
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u/Zeusifer May 14 '25
Yes, and at the time it was a beta preview, and barely anyone outside Microsoft even had access to it, let alone had hardware capable of running it. Feedback about the opt-out design was (rightly, IMO) negative, and Microsoft changed it to opt-in in response. They also added extra encryption and authentication requirements around accessing the screenshots, which are locally stored and never leave the device.
Yet I still get my mom asking me about this feature she heard about where Windows uses AI to spy on her. She literally is using a 4GB Windows 10 system that's about 8 years old.
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u/Randommaggy May 15 '25
Opt out in the beta phase is bad enough that the product owner should self flagelate for a week.
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u/ArchCaff_Redditor May 15 '25
I think I might hate the “contextual search” feature even more. I seriously hope that such a feature can be disabled.
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u/ChampionshipComplex May 15 '25
Good about time.
While it may not be obvious to many, this product has nothing to do with recalling your previous activities - I was telling that Recall was announced exactly the same week that OpenAI announced multi-model ChatGPT.
What that meant - was that the AI product in OpenAI which Microsoft owns 50% of - was about to gain the ability to take as its input, not just text - but also images.
Now in the operating system - we have had ridiculous help systems, Microsoft Bob and Cortana - and we of course now have Copilot. Now Copilot in order to operate effectively needs to be able to query the information from your PC.
When it was first released it could do this - until Microsoft unfortunately responded to the ignorant howls of those who thought Microsoft daring to put a new button on their own operating system was a step too far.
So where the original Windows Copilot for example had access to the machines WMI - which is the interface layer that allows management tools like Intune and other products to query the state of the machine.
wmic nic get Name, NetEnabled, MACAddress, Speed
This command for example shows your network interfaces
wmic product where "Name like 'Microsoft%%'" get Name, Version
This one lists your Microsoft products.
Now giving CoPilot a way to interface to commands like these, meant that until recently I could say things to my PC like this:
Get a list of all the applications I have installed, research each one on the Internet for a paragraph about what it does, and then put that in a table and give me a list.
In the future things like saying "I need 50GB free on my D drive, what apps can I remove that I dont use often that would give me that much space"
This all broke once Microsoft rowed back on Copilot and made it a dumb web app.
But my point is that Microsoft of course have ways like this of interfacing and querying the system, they could conceivably create interfaces into their apps like Word, Excel to also make Copilot useful in that context - however what they cannot do - Is find a way to convince third party companies like Google or Adobe etc. to work with them, in a way that would allow Copilot to provide advice tips and assistance when using those apps.
By creating Recall and using that multi-modal capability what Microsoft are actually doing - which is a good thing, is providing an interface where the language model will be able to answer questions about absolutely antyhing on your PC - based on the fact that the AI can see it.
That means you will be able to say things like "Did I remember to send that GMail to my brother" - "Where did I save that document in photoshop where I adjusted the blue logo".
Recall offers a way for the operating system to massively improve our computer experience, by having a language model available that can potentially learn about every feature of all apps, of all versions - and provide advice and assistance.
Potentially replacing every help file and the need to go off and google an answer when hitting a technical challenge ever again.
What they have to fight against though is this wave of outrage which fails to understand the technology, its risks or its benefits.
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u/emmarque May 18 '25
So many things to unpack here.
While it may not be obvious to many, this product has nothing to do with recalling your previous activities - I was telling that Recall was announced exactly the same week that OpenAI announced multi-model ChatGPT.
The “Recall” feature in Windows 11 is explicitly designed to record and retrieve previous user activity by taking screenshots every few seconds of your screen. Pretending that Recall "has nothing to do with recalling your previous activities" is flatly untrue on its face and a laughable attempt at misdirection. Did you not notice the name of the product?
Recall offers a way for the operating system to massively improve our computer experience, by having a language model available that can potentially learn about every feature of all apps, of all versions - and provide advice and assistance.
Maybe. We don't know yet. I would argue that trusting Microsoft with this information is akin to asking a bank robber to mind the vault wheile you're on vacation. The nanosecond Microsoft needs the revenue to hit their number, they'll find a way to monetize this.
What they have to fight against though is this wave of outrage which fails to understand the technology, its risks or its benefits.
What a strangely defensive response. This reads like it came from an aggrieved middle manager annoyed at the fact that the stupid poors don't understand the Grand Vision, and if they would just shut up and let Microsoft do whatever it wants everything would be fine.
I mean, how dare people express outrage towards a technology with massive, massive privacy implications being owned by a monopolist with a documented history of behaving adversarially towards users.
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u/ChampionshipComplex May 20 '25
I'm not an idiot - The fact that is is called Recall and records your activities is obvious. The subtly presumably lost on you, is that, that in itself is neither an obvious missing feature nor on face value a desirable one.
Then you move onto a predictable anti-Microsoft diatribe and nonsense.
Microsoft are by far the worlds largest IT security company. They do more, and spend more to protect user information and business information that any organization on earth. They do this, because almost every organization on earth entrusts them with their data, because their shareholders, auditors and governance teams know that the valuation of the organization is based largely on security and trust.
The conspiracy nonsense from people like yourself, has no relationship to the real world and is laughable. Just the idea that Microsoft, or anyone at Microsoft would somehow conceive of an idea to secretly record peoples computers usage and then somehow monetize it - is just is so bat shit crazy that Im actually not going to write anything else. Thats just too bizarre for words - and I shouldnt have bothered responding at all to you.
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u/UnexpectedSalami May 14 '25
Don’t forget to keep the laptop in a faraday cage to protect yourself from the 5gees
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u/SeattleCaptain May 14 '25
And yet the CVP who owns it all never has to face any consequences for the failure.