Technology

60128 readers

3114 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

798

Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall feature is coming back in October (www.ghacks.net)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

197 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If you thought that Microsoft was done with Recall after its catastrophic reveal as the main feature of Copilot+ PCs, you are mistaken.

Microsoft wants to bring it back this October 2024. Good news is that the company plans to introduce it in test builds of the Windows 11 operating system in October. In other words: do not expect the feature to hit stable Windows 11 PCs before 2025 at the earliest.

While Recall may have sounded great on paper and on work-related PCs, users and experts alike expressed concern. Users expressed fears that malware could steal Recall data to know exactly what they did in the past couple of months.

Others did not trust Microsoft to keep the data secure. We suggested to make Recall opt-in, instead of opt-out, to make sure that users knew what they were getting into when enabling it.

Microsoft pulled the Recall feature shortly after its announcement and published information about its future in June. There, Microsoft said that it would make Recall opt-in by default. It also wanted to improve security by enrolling in Windows Hello and other features.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 101 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Who thought they were abandoning it?

I doubt they secured it particularly well either, because the nature of proper security is building it from the ground up with security as a core principle, but it was always coming back.

They delayed because "oh shit, people noticed we didn't even bother with security theater" and to let the backlash die down. They still consider it a major selling point.

[–] stankmut 43 points 4 months ago (1 children)

By the comments I've seen, it seems like no one read their previous announcement where they said they were delaying the feature while they continued work on it. We already knew they were still going to ship it.

Just having it disabled by default is a massive improvement. It's crazy that they initially considered releasing it with no encryption and it on by default.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

It's less bad for sure. And I can understand, theoretically, the value of "that one think I saw that one time". I've definitely spent way longer than I'd want looking for some random reference I'd seen in the past, and I'm in the process of trying to catalogue all the references in my past nonfiction reading after the fact, and it's definitely a lot of work.

But man, other users on your PC could trivially see everything you did on your system unless you used the dumpster fire that's edge in private browsing mode, and the people on the project thought that was OK. There's no way people with that level of lack of awareness managed to adapt the project to not be a sieve.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

They did abandon it but it backed itself up