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Windows Recall: Microsoft's second launch attempt after devastating criticism

When Microsoft announced the AI-feature Windows Recall earlier this year, it was confident that it would receive praise for the feature.

The main idea behind Recall was to give users AI-powered access to past activity on their Windows PCs. Recall would capture a screenshot every five seconds, process the data, and allow users to interact with that data using natural language.

What followed was a wave of criticism. Privacy and security advocates criticized Microsoft for several key aspects:

  • Recall would run automatically after the initial setup. In other words, it was opt-out, not opt-in.
  • The database and data was not specially secured during runtime.

Microsoft pulled Recall shortly thereafter and promised to to better. The company has now highlighted changes that it made to Recall in a new blog post on the Windows Experience blog.

Recall: the security and privacy changes

Microsoft addresses the criticism in several ways. First, by making Windows Recall and opt-in experience. Microsoft says that users will see an option to turn on Recall during the out-of-box experience.

They may also turn it on at a later point in time. Good news for users who do not want anything to do with Recall: it can be uninstalled, despite Microsoft's previous comment that this won't be possible.

Second, Microsoft is improving security by encrypting Recall's database and running essential Recall processes in an isolated environment.

Malware cannot just copy the data during runtime anymore, thanks to the extra security.

On top of that, Windows Hello is required for certain actions. Microsoft mentions that prompts are shown when users try to make changes to Recall's settings and when they want to access the Recall user interface.

There are also rate-limiting and anti-hammering measures to limit malware attacks.

Windows Recall: Privacy Controls overview

The blog post offers a list of controls that users have over Recall; not all are new though.

Here is the overview:

  • Users control the amount of disk space that Recall uses and for how long activity data is kept.
  • Options to delete a time range, all data from a specific app or website, or anything that comes up during searches.
  • Private browsing data is never saved in Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and other Chromium-based browsers.
  • Website activity can be blocked in Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.
  • A system tray icon highlights activity and provides access to Recall.
  • Recall supports sensitive content filtering through Microsoft’s Purview information protection product.

Closing Words

The announced changes address two of the major points of criticism: that Recall was opt-out and that the data was not secured properly.

There is still some uncertainty regarding the implementation during setup and thereafter. Still, with Windows Recall being opt-in, there is less of a chance that the feature runs in the background without the user really knowing about it.

What is your take on the announced changes? Is it enough? Would you give Recall a try now, or is it still not something that you are interested in? Feel free to leave a comment down below.

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