It’s a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a new AI tool designed to remember everything you do on Windows. The feature that we never asked and never wanted it.
Microsoft, has done a lot to degrade the Windows user experience over the last few years. Everything from obtrusive advertisements to full-screen popups, ignoring app defaults, forcing a Microsoft Account, and more have eroded the trust relationship between Windows users and Microsoft.
It’s no surprise that users are already assuming that Microsoft will eventually end up collecting that data and using it to shape advertisements for you. That really would be a huge invasion of privacy, and people fully expect Microsoft to do it, and it’s those bad Windows practices that have led people to this conclusion.
Outside of the “Microsoft bad” comments, this is a prime example of why big tech companies need to stop promoting AI leads to a position where they are able to have influence over initiatives outside of AI.
The worst thing to happen to basically every product/service in tech right now is AI. It’s made Google unreliable in the eyes of normal people for the first time in decades, it’s destroying trust in Amazon content across reviews and Kindle, it’s adding features to Facebook that no one ever wanted, etc.
The article was revised with a PR release from Microsoft saying they’ll make the feature opt-in.
Let’s of course not forget that things like upgrades to Windows 11, and use of an MS Account instead of local account, were opt-in…until they weren’t. Require them to sign a contractual agreement that this feature will remain opt-in forever.
Forcing advanced keylogger to your system that anyone who has skills to break into your system can exploit freely does that
Apple ensures its operating systems are clean, polished, and without bloat.
Except for all the uninstallable Apple bloat such as Apple Music, Apple TV, etc. And the numerous bugs and issues, such as still not being able to have the touch pad and mouse scroll wheel have different settings.
The day Windows 10 loses support is the day I primary (or solo) boot Linux on my gaming desktop. The more news I read the more certain I am in this.
Why wait?
I have a laptop solo booting Ubuntu and a Steam Deck, they’re great. But on my desktop where I’m primarily playing games, many of which wirh anti cheat, it’s not worth making the switch just yet. I think another year of development into Proton and stability will make it worth it. Also, I got a NAS recently with OpenMediaVault and I only have the time to tinker with one thing at a time :P
Any advice on the switch though, or tools you use lmk!
many of which wirh anti cheat, it’s not worth making the switch just yet.
I get that. Shit like that is the only reason I stick with a dual boot.
Also, I got a NAS recently with OpenMediaVault and I only have the time to tinker with one thing at a time :P
I also get that. My self hosted gaming server can be a bit of work sometimes.
Any advice on the switch though, or tools you use lmk!
Two things, I’d go with Linux Mint Debian Edition if I we’re you. I’ve found it to be the most compatible with my games, (like 9 out of 10 or so), and have had zero major issues/glitches with it. Plus it avoids the drauam surrounding ubuntu.
The second thing is to keep a separate “home” partition for your documents/pictures/game saves/etc. Mine is [Name]_STC, with the acronym being a nod to wh40k’s Standard Template Constructs. The idea being it isn’t named something generic like “home”, or worse using the home folder.
And anytime I need to back up shit, I just zip the whole partition and put it on a separate drive. If something happens, I copy my standard template construct.
No amount of Proton work is going to fix it, it’s already most of the way there. What needs to happen is for game studios to stop including kernel-level anticheat so that the game won’t intentionally refuse to run under wine
All I want from an Os is to launch my programs of choice and not suck up my battery running unnecessary junk I couldn’t care less about.
Not really
For the retail market, most people just have phones not computers anymore. Microsoft has already lost The Battle of Windows phone.
For the Enterprise market none of this recent b******* is going to enterprise customers anyway, they would have group policies and volume licensing deals to avoid all the b*******.
For those poor retail customers who still run Windows, they suffer, but they’re minor, not significant
baloney
Bunter2
Bullshit
Just passing through and corrupting children.
O7
Thank you for your service!
Fuck yeah
For the majority of commercial users they literally don’t give a fuck either. It’s on techies that really care about his stuff sadly.
Why are you censoring yourself? Are you stupid?
Possibly. But I’m also definitely lazy, and my voice to text automatically censors. And I don’t feel like changing it. So f*** it
This is for the enterprise market more than anything. Large companies are already logging and mining everything. Slack, Teams chat, Teams voice, email, keystrokes…literally everything. Microsoft’s problem is that Enterprises are using third party products to do so. Recall solves that competitive issue for MS. I have no doubt that it will be tied to their cloud offerings, and I have no doubt that MS will retain the right to use it all of the data from the consumer side for AI training.
I’ve worked extensively in the Enterprise environment, and data exfiltration is a massive concern for any company with intellectual property, which is most of them.
Having data leak at all, another vector for exfiltration, is a huge huge risk.
Heck, I’d be surprised if Microsoft itself let its own developers run Total recall
As an infosec professional for way longer than I care to remember, you are preaching to the choir. That said, all of our clients are both large enterprise and critical infrastructure, and they all log (and mine) everything. Not only that, they are shipping this directly to third parties. It makes me break out into a cold sweat every time I think about it, but here we are.
PS: OK, all the US based ones. Our EU based client does not do this to my knowledge and I assume it has to do with EU regulations, but that’s just a wild guess.
Good point. But the companies are at least controlling the data pathway, being aware of it, signing off on it, doing it for their benefit.
And I imagine at least for the US companies, every company they exfiltrate data to, is contractually obligated to keep their data private
Lol! How incredibly detached from reality!
Nobody cares! Well a few people care that make a big fuss, but most people don’t ever think about their os. I bet a pretty big percentage don’t know what os they use and I bet more than half don’t know what version of the os they are using.
Nobody cares!
Haha I thought I recognized that username. The same person arguing with me that recall was a brilliant move which will solidify Microsoft as the industry leader they’ve always been 😂
Ah, the asshole! I thought I blocked you already. Bye!
Hey block me too, you’re too dumb to exist in my space
They don’t care, but their nephew that has to fix the PC is it acts up cares, and when the nephew says he’s not touching that thing with a 10 foot pole they’ll consider that for their next purchase.
And if in the news there is an article that thanks to copilot they could identify the culprit in a crime, they’ll look at any Windows version and their stroking material in a map on that drive a little different.
This. Normal users give zero shit, they neither understand nor care about any of this. If they can use a cool feature they will. How many use Facebook again? What do they care about privacy? Exactly.
They lost trust from some niche <10 %, that’s it, from which most use/want to use Linux anyway.
If we could tackle the idea that Privacy matters and get more common folk aware of what they are losing, then I would like that very much.
Sure, would be great. Like many other things, including far more important topics. But that is not the world we live in. The head line is simply nonsense and it will break absolutely for Microsoft.
Once again, the penguin was been vindicated.
Im cryin over here, honest injun
it isn’t a nightmare for them. they will be fine. they normalize everything they do
Whatevs, sheeple will continue to bleet about how bad things are but not take any steps to enact change.
This other side of the coin, and this is coming from a long time Linux user, is that for the vast majority of its life Linux has focused on functionality and not toward anything the majority of people care about. Only relatively recently is it a fairly good experience for the average user, but it still has some issues that will mean most users won’t even consider it.
I really wish it could become mainstream, but until it fixes that fine tuning then most people won’t consider it vs a Mac or Windows.
Remember the Zune? It has way more features and functionality than the iPod. But nobody cared. There’s a reason it lost.
A lot of us put up with Linux because of our principles or because we’re developers.
A lot of people here seem to be missing the nuance.
Sure, it’s problematic for their consumer market share, but you’re right that that’ll probably be forgotten by the mostly tech-illiterate populace over time. But that’s not the problem.
Step 0 of MS’s plan for this should have been “make sure there is an absolutely bulletproof and ironclad way to disable that stuff completely for enterprise customers”. And they didn’t do that. So now, enterprise IT writ large is going to… you know… just not buy any of these devices. Which is absolutely their right.
But the really frustrating bit is that MS may have significantly harmed the rollout of ARM-based laptops (as well as x86 chips with beefy NN-optimized tiles) with this, and additionally done real, massive harm to Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm by doing so. All three of those manufacturers have gone to ENORMOUS lengths to roll this tech out, largely at MS’s behest. They’re all going to take this on the chin if the rollout goes poorly. And the rollout is already going poorly.
But MS thought they could Apple-handwave away the details. And they can’t, because a lot of people who understand the absurd security implications of continuous capture and OCR and plaintext storage of the OCR output. It’s not something you can handwave away. It’s entirely a non-starter in the context of maintaining organizational security (as well as personal data security, but we’ve already talked about why that’s a bit of a moot point with the general public). But enterprise IT largely does try to take their job seriously, and they are collectively calling MS’s bluff.
The problem for the long term is that MS has pretty much proven to the IT industry with this stunt that they can’t be trusted to make software that conforms to their needs. That’s a stain that isn’t going to go away any time soon. It might even be the spark that finally triggers enterprise to move away from MS as a primary client OS. After all, Linux is WAY easier to manage from a security perspective.
For anyone for whom Micro$oft’s reputation wasn’t already cartoonish villainy, sure.
For those of us from the olde worlde, who marveled at dancing monkey boy on a grainy quicktime file, it’s absolutely par for the course. They can shutter everything but cloud tomorrow and still rake in 100 Billion a year for the foreseeable future. It was a monopoly thirty years ago (convicted 20 years ago) that has eaten and shat whatever and wherever it wanted for decades.
The judiciary and congress don’t understand shit, and if they did m$ bought them. Done.
Microsoft has built a number of safety features into Windows Recall to ensure that the service can’t run secretly in the background. When Windows Recall is enabled, it places a permanent visual indicator icon on the Taskbar to let the user know that Windows Recall is capturing data. This icon cannot be hidden or moved.
Oh my, that one is really cute
This icon cannot be hidden or moved.
Or what? Your computer will take out a club and beat you to death?
You can’t convince me someone couldn’t do it with a simple registry edit, or even just replace the icon with something else by swapping an icon file somewhere in Windows/
Malware will disable that icon. Law enforcement will buy thay malware.
Well find out in 10 years that that wasn’t true and that it did capture data when the icon wasn’t present whoopsies.
If chkCaptureData.checked then recall() bigNotify() Else recall() End
I’m telling everyone I know it’s time to move to Linux, or worst case Mac.
