this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
358 points (98.9% liked)

A Boring Dystopia

9717 readers
482 users here now

Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.

Rules (Subject to Change)

--Be a Decent Human Being

--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title

--Posts must have something to do with the topic

--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.

--No NSFW content

--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

The new “Recall” feature really does look good on paper, but the taking in mind that it catalogues almost everything you do on your computer, it could turn out to be a privacy nightmare. “logging things you do in apps, tracking communications in live meetings, remembering all websites you’ve visited for research, and more,” according to the Verge. What could this mean for future computing? It would certainly make digital forensics a whole lot easier…..

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 135 points 5 months ago (6 children)

In case anyone read the headline and was worried it would pop up on your computer overnight, it does appear to need some hefty and recent processors and between 6-25GBs free in order to run at all, so I don't think it'll sneak up on folks any time soon.

On the bad news front, I thought this was standard AI bad until I got to the part where it won't obscure passwords. But, surprise, it will obscure DRM content (and private browsing, but just if you're using Microsoft Edge).

Terrible for privacy aware consumers but I really anticipate the worst of this will be in a corporate setting. Plenty of employers already spy on employees but this would be pretty next level.

[–] somethingp 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Yeah it takes screenshots periodically and all the storage and analysis is done on your local device, which is why it requires the newer CPUs with NPUs from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. There's a setting to turn the whole feature off, and you can also choose to turn it off for only certain applications, etc. Microsoft seems to be making an effort to encourage chip manufacturers to make better NPUs so that their AI features can run as locally as possible. That's likely why their new surface devices will be using the snapdragon x elite processors because they're the only ones that have NPUs with enough TOPS to run all the AI features Microsoft wants on device, instead of having to send the data for processing to a Microsoft server. I think beyond trying to quell privacy concerns, it would be a huge cost for Microsoft if they had to have enough compute available to run all these AI tasks for users for free. I'm sure there's still some way they are logging pieces of info here and there, but they'll have to include some way to make sure the OS is secure enough for business operations that are handling secure information.

People are acting as if auto saving, web history, reopen last used windows, etc aren't already features on all modern apps and OSes. If the claim about everything staying on device is true then this is no different.

load more comments (5 replies)