This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Windows Recall today: Your data is private and stays on local machine.
Recall after 2 years: We may use your data to train our AI models, improve our services and personalize your experince.
Best part? It's using your hardware and electricity to train the models.
In a few years they'll charge you monthly for the priviledge of using/knowing what it collected on you.
Recall after 2 years: Your personalized ads are generated on device based on preferences detected by Recall and our partners. Recall shares these preferences with Microsoft and our 23,671.5 partners and 16 nation-state partners around the world to better serve you <3.
I wonder who the 0.5 partner is...
The user? Not even worth a full share.
The user is definitely 0.0 partner's worth
"You can turn it off", "it's an optional feature", they didn't even last a year! What ever happened to slowly boiling the frog?
"Slowly" is relative. Also remember that windows 10 was the last windows you would need to ever buy? (To be fair that is more true then Microsoft would like these days)
The frog is a captive audience
Set up a new pc for someone today. Turned off all the OneDrive backup options. Rebooted and copied their files from a USB to SATA adapter. They turned the backup settings back on again!
Can't trust Microsoft.
Yep. I’ve set up Windows a few times recently, and they don’t give even the slightest consideration for your settings. Few days later, they changed right back.
They will be configured to benefit Microsoft first. Maybe not immediately. But it sounds like a losing game.
You need to make a Powershell script or batch that uninstalls/turns off the feature and then make a scheduled task that runs the ps1/bat at login.
Its insane that this is what you have to do to keep this shit off your system, but it's effective.
I had to do this with New Outlook because it kept reinstalling after Windows updates.
They "trust me" dumb fucks
May not have been Gates that said it, but it embodies an attitude which appears prevalent throughout big business.
Edit: O&O Shut Up is a free tool that helps you easily turn off/disable quite a few of the worst "features" on Windows.
(re)Ditched Windows on my PC a while ago, still have to use Windows at work. Just checked my work laptop running Windows 11 (standard laptop, not a "Copilot+PC") - sure enough, that Recall shit is installed and active. Disabled it, and made a post in our main company Teams channel with screenshots. Will be interesting to see if there are any reactions to this.
To find out if it is active in Windows 11, open up 'cmd' and use: (typing this from memory, hope it is correct)
dism /online /get-featureinfo /featurename:Recall
to disable it, you need a 'cmd' instance with admin rights:
dism /online /disable-feature /featurename:Recall
Mentioned this in another comment. Take that second dism line, and put it in a batch script and make it a scheduled task that runs at login. Or use a Powershell script to make it a little smarter - check if it's enabled first and then disable it if it is.
Modern problems require modern solutions.
Any IT admins in the audience: this is what remediation scripts were made for
It will be re-enabled after update : )
My company blocks screenshots (luckily we don't have high definition cameras in or pocket at all times, else that would seem stupid) so I'm wondering what they will do if those are user accessible.
I've been running Pop!_OS with the Cinnamon desktop environment on my machine at home for the past 3 months. I'm very impressed with the out-of-the-box experience. All my games run in Steam or Lutris.
Fuck Microsoft.
For me the same, but with kubuntu. Linux is really ready to be used as a desktop.
FWIW I was worried this might be on W10 (hey, they might try it) so I tried the >dism commands found earlier in this thread (thanks btw!) & got “Feature name Recall is unknown”.
Safe for now
Switched back to Linux this week and I couldn't be happier.
Upgraded*
Even on Pro or Enterprise editions? I can't imagine businesses tolerating this never mind governments.
Keep in mind that this doesn't necessarily mean that recall itself is actually doing recall stuff or even running a process (I haven't checked if it does but not necessarily) like it would on a copilot laptop.
It is however very stupid that you can't uninstall recall without messing up the file Explorer. My guess is that it's a bug or some weird dependency needed with explorer.exe that handles the file explorer and a bunch of other stuff like the desktop and taskbar. It could also be spying but this seems like a stupidly obvious way to do it if they wanted too.
So wait, did I miss a step or is this NOT the recall feature they announced for Copilot Plus PCs? None of the screen snapshots, none of the AI search.
As far as I can tell it's some variation on the logging search that was in Windows in Win8, right? At least when it comes to user-facing functionality.
EDIT: As far as I can tell, people mentioning this mean the full Recall feature, but even though the package shows up on my Copilot+ PC the functionality itself is nowhere to be seen. I'm still confused about this and relatively convinced something is being missed somewhere.
Switching to linux few years back is really fucking printing...
I was spending so much time cleaning up windows and then microshit would roll my settings back🤡
Saw this bullshit coming, already got a linux mint dual boot setup on my work pc.
PSA: If you have a bigger usb formatted to the ntfs file system, consider switching it to exfat file system when working with linux. I had a hard freeze up and couldn’t get my files off for a bit, and this what I suspect was the issue.
