Technology

This is just a fucking privacy nightmare. We like to laugh and play here about Linux quite a bit, but holy shit this is the actual "If you're using Windows and expect privacy at all, this is it, you should throw that notion out the window."

I don't care how much encryption there is, or the assurance that it's only on your hard drive, I've sat in too many corporate meetings in my career to trust that. There is no way Microsoft is just letting you have that data and they're not reporting it out. Very least? They're using ML on it to aggregate what it sees in the screenshot, and then saving that. Worst case, they're saving it to an encrypted blob storage, calling that encrypted, and hiding deep in the ToS that you actually agreed to that (even though it said in the big letters it was local only, sorry woopsie in the small letters it said it's also stored there.)

Fuck, ignoring the obvious pron implications that I assume everyone here is immediately thinking of, think of HIPAA, think of the private communications with therapists that people have, think of all of the financial documents you've opened, think about bank accounts, chats, fucking everything.

I'll legitimately be moving to Linux today. This just broke the camel's back for me.

I'm curious whether the increasingly invasive telemetry of modern Windows will have legal implications surrounding patient privacy here in the US. I work IT in the healthcare field, and one of our key missions is HIPAA compliance. What, then, will be the impact if Microsoft starts storing more and more in-depth data offsite? Will keyboard entries into our EHR be tracked and stored in Microsoft's servers? Will we subsequently be held liable if a breach at Microsoft causes this information to leak, or if Microsoft just straight-up starts selling it to advertisers? Windows is our one-and-only option for endpoint devices, so it's not like we can just switch.

I genuinely don't have the answers to these questions right now, but it may start to become a serious conversation for our department in the future if things continue at the trajectory they're going at. Or, maybe I'm just old and paranoid and everything will be okie dokie.

That closing quote is ominous:

"Recall is currently in preview status," Microsoft says on its website. "During this phase, we will collect customer feedback, develop more controls for enterprise customers to manage and govern Recall data, and improve the overall experience for users."

I read "so, yeah, we built in all the telemetry connections we swear we'll never use ... just for testing, ya know?"

Despite the privacy concerns, Microsoft says that the Recall index remains local and private on-device, encrypted in a way that is linked to a particular user's account.

Just like how Microsoft domain-bound emails were stored locally on machines running Outlook, right? Or how purchasing and downloading music, movies, and video games meant that we owned them, right?

I don’t believe for a fucking second that this “feature” will remain locally encrypted forever. Fuck Microsoft, fuck the AI bubble.

“Don’t be evil!

…

wait, you say you’ll pay me to be evil? Well fuck that changes everything!”

I have to believe at this point that a serious generation gap exists if there is an audience for this sort of constant monitoring. Because that's what it is.

Where it goes and whether Microsoft can be trusted are of course very valid concerns, but Jesus tap-dancing Christ, this is surveillance before the data go anywhere. Add that to your AI assistant that works best with the camera on, et voila!

No doubt Google is going to say "hold my beer," and there's no pure Linux offramp on the overwhelming majority of Android hardware, so even if you've told Microsoft to fuck off ...

As you might imagine, all this snapshot recording comes at a hardware penalty. To use Recall, users will need to purchase one of the new "Copilot Plus PCs" powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, which include the necessary neural processing unit (NPU). There are also minimum storage requirements for running Recall, with a minimum of 256GB of hard drive space and 50GB of available space. The default allocation for Recall on a 256GB device is 25GB, which can store approximately three months of snapshots. Users can adjust the allocation in their PC settings, with old snapshots being deleted once the allocated storage is full.

Oh no my computer doesn't meet the hardware requirements whatever shall I do

"Recall screenshots are only linked to a specific user profile and Recall does not share them with other users, make them available for Microsoft to view, or use them for targeting advertisements. Screenshots are only available to the person whose profile was used to sign in to the device," Microsoft says.

It's conspicuous that this statement talks only about the raw screenshots, not any data derived from them (such as aggregated data, inferred data, or even just slightly reprocessed data). So Microsoft could do any minor reworking of the data and send it off to the cloud for their own purposes, while technically complying with the above.

How does this work with local laws regarding 2 party recording? If you're on a video call and this records the other party without their permission, that is AFAIU illegal in many states in the US. I'm sure in parts of Europe as well.

on your PC

*on Microsofts PC.

A lawsuit waiting to happen... someone needs to class action MS for systemic breaches of privacy. Think of all the critical infrastructure, government, medical, policing, etc. systems processing sensitive, private, and in some cases classified, information.

I miss windows 7

This is great, I can show all my 4k porn collection to my managers doing Teams screen sharing!

Good news , it is just on their Copilot+ computers for now. For now is likely doing some heavy lifting there, though.

I threw Mint on a partition to test moving away from Windows, and sadly does not play well with my 2080ti. This makes me want to put more effort into getting it to work...

NOPE!

You cannot pay me to use Windows 11.

I open windows and it starts recording: opens Plex, plays Mash for 13 hours straight, PC closed down.

I mean, no thanks.

But they did this already, right? Their "Timeline" feature in Windows 10 recorded a log of your activities to display it in your Win+Tab menu screen. I switched it off immediately, but the point is this is a new approach to an old feature they have done in the past.

Everybody must have turned it off, though, because it hadn't been present in Win 11 until now. It's still a dumb idea.

Well, so, you use password generator, the password screenshot is saved.

This makes most password generators useless because they show the password for user feedback. You can turn this MS AI off, but I will have no idea if there was a bug.

In light of the recent forays by AI projects/products into the reason of coding assistants, from copilot to Devin, this reads to me as a sign that they've finally accepted that you can't make an ai assistant that provides actual value from an LLM purely trained on text.

This is Microsoft copying Google's captcha homework. We trained their OCR for gBooks, we trained their image recognition on traffic lights and buses and so signs.

Now we get to train their ai assistant on how to click around a windows OS.

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