Microsoft is gradually rolling out the AI-powered Windows Recall feature to Insiders in the Release Preview channel before making it generally available to all Windows users with Copilot+ PCs.
Recall is an opt-in Windows feature that screenshots active windows every few seconds, analyzes them, and allows Windows 11 users to search text within the snapshots using natural language.
As the Windows Insider Program Team said on Thursday, Recall can be paused whenever needed and will only allow access to the data it captures after authenticating via Windows Hello.
Of course it is opt in. Why would it not be? Microsoft have opted in automatically on your behalf. Soon you will only be able to opt in, for your convenience, as too many people were accidentally opting out. /s
As much as everyone seems to hate Recall, I really appreciate it. It was the final push I needed to go to Linux full time. Have been on Linux for 6 months now and can't imagine going back to windows.
It was one of the reasons I switched. That and my favorite mod manager is working on a Linux native version. It's not done yet, but it's good to play other games from time to time.
Valheim is pretty brutal, but also highly moddable.
I love how no matter how much the market makes it explicitly clear that an idea is absolutely terrible, Microsoft will just be like, "we're doing it anyway, fuck you." The best argument for Linux is just to gesture vaguely at Windows.
Hey gamers: try bazzite Linux and you won’t ever have to worry about this. Try bringing one old machine over as a test and you’ll see for yourself.
I got it running in an afternoon recently. It reads all your windows docs off an external backup. The desktop version really can be a daily driver. The update script is a single click. Genuinely worth considering if you want at least some of your computer usage to not be recorded 24/7.
Imagine paying for a surveillance machine that takes pictures and records everything you do ready to regurgitate it to anyone who asks. The fact that anyone sees this as anything other than dystopian is a bridge to far for me.
Android has been doing shit like this for years. It’s a marketing tool more than anything. But there’s a weird tribalism around Android so everyone just forgives it. But when windows does it people suddenly care about privacy.
I don't really understand who this is even aimed at. Anyone who needs to keep records of their work to refer back to already uses some kind of record keeping system such as version control or ticket creation. When I'm doing that I don't need to keep a record of all of the ancillary actions I'm doing.
Web browsers have history, files can be reverted to previous versions in Windows already, as I said version control software exists (Github is even owned by Microsoft) and there is already software such as Shadow play.
Who exactly is going to be using Recall that doesn't already have a perfectly good, and actually dedicated, solution in place?
Shrinking their market share is a much bigger middle finger. If you use their product and shut off a bunch of features, you're still using the rest of their product and its other features.
No, no ,no. You roll out a wildly overreaching implementation so everyone one is upset, that way you can release a just mostly overreaching version and everyone thinks it's better than what you tried last time.
It's not even just about shoving AI into everything. That would be bad enough but this feature is literally useless, and it isn't as if Microsoft doesn't have a plethora of other features people want them to work on.
How about inventing Windows airdrop? Or spend some time unifying the UI so it doesn't all look like it was developed by two separate teams working independently. Nah, let's just build some spy software.
Hell I'd even accept them spending some time making a non-shit version of Teams