Recall remains a phenomenally bad idea. I don't understand why anyone would green light it.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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And if that doesn't convince you: $$$$$.
It sounds like a great idea if you don't think too long about it and none else has it yet. People like that don't care about security or privacy concerns, as long as there is no law against it. Gotta earn money and the competition is fierce.
And with "people" I mean executives just as much as engineers. Gotta earn money fast > being ethically aware of the implications of your work
I guess. I mean I immediately thought "I don't want it capturing the porn I look at", but maybe people really don't think about privacy at all.
I don't really see how it makes money, since it's bundled into windows (right?).
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Doesn't surprise me one iota. This is why I will be abandoning Windows next year and moving to Linux and doing the same for my parents.
Why wait? Hell, you can test out a live distro in a virtual machine to start learning about it right now before taking the big leap. Unless you're already familiar with Linux anyways. 🐧
Indeed I am. I already have a dual-boot setup on my laptop (not yet on my desktop) but need to finish testing Linux alternatives and/or running under WINE for some of my Windows-only software. I've been slowly chipping away at that over the past few months and expect to continue to do so over the next few as well, after which I hope to be ready to completely switch over.
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I hope the transition goes smoothly for you!
Same boat! I've switched over two of my lesser used devices to Mint already (an old surface tablet and my work laptop), only hesitation is with my gaming machine. Everything has been set up just how I like it so I'm not eager to start from scratch there but once I'm confident and comfortable on my work laptop I'll make the switch there too
While dual booting into Pop, I can see my Windows SSD and all of its contents. It might make testing a little easier for you!
Running games from the NTFS partition won't work very well/at all, you'll want to redownload those to a Linux filesystem.
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I'm so mad that I'm going to call customer support, they're going to look at my social security, phone number, password, whatever in recall, and I don't have a choice except to not interact with other people on computers.
well of course it does. There is no way for it to know what it is capturing. Best it can do is capture it, and maybe discard it if it manages to detect any sensitive info. Which won't work every time
Technically, it could be coded to recognize the various formats of strings and blur everything indiscriminately.
- OCR is never perfect.
- A partial credit card number or partial SSN wouldn't match the format, but is still sensitive.
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that would require knowing the formats of strings. And it requires the text to be text.
What if you had a photo of a handwritten piece of sensitive information?
I doubt that OCR (optical character recognition) is done on device so it likely being sent to some server for processing.
As a software engineer, in any of our corporate applications when a user hits delete we toggle an archived flag, but the data is still there. So I wouldn’t trust any application to do what it actually says.
There are so many technical barriers for recall to ever be able to not snipe your private data that I wouldn’t go anywhere near the thing.
Edit: Furthermore, what happens when MS inevitably gets hacked again and someone steals all the data it has and then starts using that to commit fraud.
As a software engineer, in any of our corporate applications when a user hits delete we toggle an archived flag, but the data is still there.
What many people don't realize is that this is how some low level data stores work as well. Even regular ol' file systems do this (basically).
Yeah I was shocked when I first started and was questing this behaviour with the owner and lead engineer.
They assured me it complies with GDPR as after a period of time we will anonymise the data.
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The only way it could possibly censor sensitive information is if it captured it in the first place and then determined that it was in a sensitive category and then censored it. Recall still has to capture it first to make that determination.
I don't understand why this isn't everyone's immediate thought after hearing Microsoft say their system would censor sensitive information. How could it possibly know what to censor without reading it first? Of course it's going to invade your privacy, and then maybe they'll selectively delete some of it when you ask them to.
I wouldn't be surprised if it all gets uploaded to cloud storage first, and then the "sensitive" stuff gets deleted from the local storage only.
Im always astounded at how tech companies swing between 'for your convenience' and 'for your security/ privacy', and how often users just take them at their word, then wonder why the noose on the neck of their personal choices and freedoms keep getting tighter and tighter.
PSA - It's probably gonna capture religious and political affiliations and weird pornography fetishes, too. Lol.
As was mentioned, it's just a bad idea.
Edit: Here's a particularly cynical prediction: Joe Consumer angry to learn that Recall backups were used to lower his credit score, and (incorrectly) deny his insurance claim.
Benefits:
- a little better local search?
Downsides:
- identity theft
- more intrusive ads
- loss of insurance coverage
- ruined relationships
- scammers draining bank accounts
Seems reasonable.
Lol it’s like the old screen-cap malware/viruses from the XP days, except M$ is doing it for “legit” reasons.
The Windows 11 migration is mandatory, and there is no lube. They’ll gradually lower the tech requirements as it approaches to minimize people looking for alternatives.
But make no mistake, Microsoft is asserting the leverage of its market share for full enshittification. Linux or Mac or eat the shit they’re giving you.
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Oh look! Microsoft is doing the thing they assured us they wouldn't do! What a fucking shocker! What is it, the tenth time this year?
how in the hell do they think this is going to go over in It for corporate America with sensitive data on everyone's workstations?? what about the rest of the world ?
This will go over extremely well. (for the CEOs) Management, ignoring all advice by the company's IT people, will order them to enable Recall to "improve productivity" because one guy on LinkedIn said it made him one quattuordecillion percent more productive, IT will protest but will be inevitably shot down. Everything will be fine for a bit until some attacker inevitably gets into their systems and steals the Recall data from all their active workstations, leading to the compromise of almost every system they have.
They offer their customers 1 free year of credit monitoring, promise to do better, never get punished by the law, rinse and repeat.
Meanwhile, the CEO's paycheck will never take a hit no matter what they do.
The new version of Recall is now opt-in rather than opt-out – I got prompted to enable Recall immediately after installing the Insider Build.
This seems to be the important bit, hopefully it stays opt in.
Narrator: "It didn't"
How does the filter know which information is sensitive...
Microsoft Recall is a bad idea with tremendously and insanely amateuristic and shit implementation
Surprised pikachu
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