News Microsoft confirms that Windows 11 Recall AI is not optional — a glitch made it appear so in the Windows 11 24H2 KB5041865 update

[Admin]

Windows 11's Recall AI feature cannot be disabled despite a toggle in the current version.

Microsoft confirms that Windows 11 Recall AI is not optional — a glitch made it appear so in the Windows 11 24H2 KB5041865 update : Read more

 

[USAFRet]

3rd party function to disable/delete coming in 3..2...1....

 

[ex_bubblehead]

How is it that I'm not convinced this wasn't intentional on Microsoft's part. They've always been slimey.

 

[thestryker]

I've never really understood the irrational angst regarding Edge. That's one of those things where if you don't like it just don't use it. I don't use Edge for anything other than websites that don't behave in Firefox, but it's nice to have for exactly that reason. Generally speaking when it comes to Windows programs/services so long as whatever it is isn't actively running/pulling telemetry I don't tend to care.

With regards to Recall so long as it can actually be completely disabled I don't see a problem. That is the key though it has to be able to be completely disabled, and not enable itself with Windows Update which is where my concern comes in. Of course those of us in desktop land are largely safe due to lack of hardware, but that isn't guaranteed going forward.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

This absolutely makes sense. Microsoft doesn't need people uninstalling things on Insider builds as it defeats the thing Insider builds are meant for: To find bugs before they go into wide release. When it comes time for the wide release and especially by 24H2 it will most likely be either be explicitly Opt-In, as they were prepared to do before they pulled it from release, or able to be fully disabled.

No real reason to get your dander up.

 

[hotaru251]

3rd party function to disable/delete coming in 3..2...1....

yup. Same way people got rid of cortana in WIN10 back in day before MS let you do it legit yrs later.

TBHI will just avoid ever using a PC w/ an NPU that way I will not meet its min req and not have to worry about it until there are work arounds to get rid of/disable it.

 

[ThatMouse]

The issue is every time I open a PDF I get Edge. For whatever reason Windows makes it a pain to change the default functionality, i.e. tell it what you want the default apps to be. And it will nag you until the end of time and even switch it back to a Microsoft app whenever it feels like it.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

Windows always struggled with viruses, but now MS is putting them in the OS as features.

 

[russell_john]

And Microsoft actually wonders why Windows 11 is bombing and 65% of users are still on Windows 10 three years later .......

Windows 11 = Windows 8 = Windows Vista = complete garbage

 

[USAFRet]

And Microsoft actually wonders why Windows 11 is bombing and 65% of users are still on Windows 10 three years later .......

https://www.tomshardware.com/softwa...market-share-milestone-in-latest-steam-survey

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

https://www.tomshardware.com/softwa...market-share-milestone-in-latest-steam-survey

If you use a much broader source though, Windows 11 has about 32% market share vs Windows 10's 64%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide

 

[USAFRet]

If you use a much broader source though, Windows 11 has about 32% market share vs Windows 10's 64%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide

Very true.

But I expect this is mostly due to people having current systems that are 'good enough'.
Especially people that buy a prebuilt. Which is most.

There is little reason to buy a new system, hence not Win 11 yet.

Not people avoiding Win 11 for any particular reason, just not seeing a real need to change. Yet.


Of course, I could be completely wrong. But I don't see a vast uprising of having WIn 11 and then going back to 10.

 

[abufrejoval]

I've never really understood the irrational angst regarding Edge.

That fear isn't irrational, it about being better informed.

That's one of those things where if you don't like it just don't use it.

Again, that's where you err: Microsoft makes the decision to use Edge for you in many cases and as soon as Edge starts it goes about changing your system even further, phoning home faster than you can kill it. And by the way: it configures itself to continue running in the background.

And I've had it reinstall and reactivate Edge on every release update, even when I had carefully removed it even from the installation media originally used for my systems.

I don't use Edge for anything other than websites that don't behave in Firefox, but it's nice to have for exactly that reason.

In those cases you're better off using Brave or some Chrome-variant, which has the Google poison removed.

Generally speaking when it comes to Windows programs/services so long as whatever it is isn't actively running/pulling telemetry I don't tend to care.

That's the issue, Edge makes it a lot easier to pull telemetry that's already prefiltered on your PC. Didn't you hear how Edge would pass your search and browse history to Microsoft, even if you told it not to?

It's really quite plain and simple: you can't have the same company control both sides of the Internet, the servers and the browsers, that needs to be illegal because it invites collusion.

Obviously goes for Google, too, which is why Chrome is a no-go, too, especially on Android.

All of these companies have abused their control over the base platform, again and again. And they are very strongly motived to continue abusing that control, evading detection, evading regulation, as long as they possibly can.

And the only way to reduce their ability to abuse is separation of powers or software in this case.

With regards to Recall so long as it can actually be completely disabled I don't see a problem. That is the key though it has to be able to be completely disabled, and not enable itself with Windows Update which is where my concern comes in. Of course those of us in desktop land are largely safe due to lack of hardware, but that isn't guaranteed going forward.

Again, what's disabled is mostly dormant, ready to be awakened by some seemingly innocent action here or there.

Quite simply all OS vendors need to make these things not only optional and disabled, but not installed by default. The only truly safe software is software that simply isn't there in the first place.

If Microsoft and Windows were judged on human terms, they would be a butler and an academy that trains them.

The way both behave, they'd be behind bars.

As Romans, they'd be lion fodder in the Circus Maximus.

 

[thestryker]

That fear isn't irrational, it about being better informed.

Again, that's where you err: Microsoft makes the decision to use Edge for you in many cases and as soon as Edge starts it goes about changing your system even further, phoning home faster than you can kill it. And by the way: it configures itself to continue running in the background.

I've never had any of this happen at all without opening Edge. Is it perhaps a Windows 11 thing? I've only got one device running Win11 and it's my handheld so I never really open anything on it.

In those cases you're better off using Brave or some Chrome-variant, which has the Google poison removed.

There's no advantage to doing this over just using Edge for the times this happens.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Very true.

But I expect this is mostly due to people having current systems that are 'good enough'.
Especially people that buy a prebuilt. Which is most.

There is little reason to buy a new system, hence not Win 11 yet.

Not people avoiding Win 11 for any particular reason, just not seeing a real need to change. Yet.


Of course, I could be completely wrong. But I don't see a vast uprising of having WIn 11 and then going back to 10.

Same argument I made in the other thread. Offices, libraries, people who only use their PCs for Facebook and may still be using Windows 7 (or XP), plenty of places non-Windows 11 supported hardware is perfectly fine for, and many places where Windows 10 is likely to persist beyond its support end date.

 

[USAFRet]

I've never had any of this happen at all without opening Edge. Is it perhaps a Windows 11 thing? I've only got one device running Win11 and it's my handheld so I never really open anything on it.

I've not seen it either.

I have 2x Win 11 systems, one each Home and Pro.

Edge only appears when I purposely invoke it.

My main system, Win 11 Pro, has Firefox as the default, and I can't remember the last time Edge ran on it.
My Surface Go 3 is also Win 11, and FF as the default browser. No Edge unless I invoke it.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

Same argument I made in the other thread. Offices, libraries, people who only use their PCs for Facebook and may still be using Windows 7 (or XP), plenty of places non-Windows 11 supported hardware is perfectly fine for, and many places where Windows 10 is likely to persist beyond its support end date.

Truth be told, Windows 11 doesn't offer anything substantial for the vast majority of users, including heavy users, that couldn't be added into Windows 10 as an update.

 

[abufrejoval]

I've not seen it either.

I have 2x Win 11 systems, one each Home and Pro.

Edge only appears when I purposely invoke it.

My main system, Win 11 Pro, has Firefox as the default, and I can't remember the last time Edge ran on it.
My Surface Go 3 is also Win 11, and FF as the default browser. No Edge unless I invoke it.

Lucky you then.

I've got tons of physical and virtual systems in the home lab and within the family so I've developed a routine to get rid of the worst transgression of Windows right from the start (it's Windows 10 and 11 Enterprise as well as Windows Server 2022 DC Edition here, but I also use Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC).

That includes setting the default browser to Firefox, apart from deactivating everything in the privacy settings and deactivating the user experienc daemon, removing OneDrive, Teams, Office 365, Xbox etc. you get the picture. And of course I use the Open/Classic shell, because I don't want to broadcast my start menu actions to Microsoft, either.

And of course you can remove all these app as many times as you want, the're just back the next time you check as well as for every other user (I only use local accounts, there obviously is no Microsoft account on any of my systems).

But a) Windows will ask you "do you really want to change away from our wonderful Edge?" (paraphrased) and if you insist, that won't change the default for many of the other actions and file associations that exist for a browser.

So if you slip on a help button by accident: boom, Edge will open and start popping up all kinds of "news you might be interested in" etc.. You might have had SumatraPDF installed and configured to open all PDF documents online or local, but after an update, it's Edge again, using an embedded reader that hands a copy of all your most interesting data to Microsoft servers.

And once Edge has opened, have a look at the process explorer, after you have "closed" that browser: you'll see plenty of edge processes still running.

That's where I turned to NTlite to ensure all that cruft doesn't even get installed in the first place... and that works just fine.

Until Microsoft decides to destroy it all with one update or another.

At least with one of the recent ones, I got the option to remove Edge from the system, too.

But I wonder if it's just the same as will all those "Weather, Microsoft Maps, Mail, Contact" etc. apps, where "removing" them is just another datapoint that Microsoft collects without actually doing anything.

Microsoft Server 2022 is somewhat better than even Windows 10/11 Enterprise in that it really doesn't try to force Online accounts, Microsoft Store, OneDrive or some Xbox stuff on you.

But installing AMD drivers is a nightmare, because AMD is penny pinching on signing those with a server key.. It's got other issues with special hardware or with VR and not great on laptops.

And it doesn't help a lot extending EOL vs IoT LTSC, while all the newer servers seem to be GUI-less, only.

I'm doing as much Linux as I can, but the needle still sticks in the vein.

 

[abufrejoval]

Truth be told, Windows 11 doesn't offer anything substantial for the vast majority of users, including heavy users, that couldn't be added into Windows 10 as an update.

Or if it adds things like hypervisor based security it silently kills VMware Workstation (by enabling Hyper-V, which is lacking features) or makes it much slower.

But yeah, Microsoft needs to sell licenses and hardware vendors want to sell new hardware (with recycled plastic bits for greenwashing) so they collude and create planned obsolescence.

And no, I do not ever want to use a TPM or bitlocker on any of my home-lab and family systems: the ability to move storage any way I want is far more important than what ever "security" they sell, which won't hold up against Palantir or nation state nasties (foreign and domestic) anyway.

And if I do in fact use a TPM, it will be a virtual one, so I can copy, clone, move the VM with the really critical data away from danger and loss: did I mention it's likely to run on a Proxmox cluster host?

 

[ThomasKinsley]

Or if it adds things like hypervisor based security it silently kills VMware Workstation (by enabling Hyper-V, which is lacking features) or makes it much slower.

But yeah, Microsoft needs to sell licenses and hardware vendors want to sell new hardware (with recycled plastic bits for greenwashing) so they collude and create planned obsolescence.

And no, I do not ever want to use a TPM or bitlocker on any of my home-lab and family systems: the ability to move storage any way I want is far more important than what ever "security" they sell, which won't hold up against Palantir or nation state nasties (foreign and domestic) anyway.

And if I do in fact use a TPM, it will be a virtual one, so I can copy, clone, move the VM with the really critical data away from danger and loss: did I mention it's likely to run on a Proxmox cluster host?

It's the illusion of an upgrade without the substance. The same is true for their office products. We don't need a new office suite every three years, except for security updates, but those are minor updates, which is why MS moved to an expensive subscription based model with 365.

 

[CelicaGT]

Outside of a corporate environment who does this feature benefit and why is it in anything but an Enterprise build?

 

[abufrejoval]

It's the illusion of an upgrade without the substance. The same is true for their office products. We don't need a new office suite every three years, except for security updates, but those are minor updates, which is why MS moved to an expensive subscription based model with 365.

365 is a completely different ball game and much, much worse than everything else they've done recently.

The subscription aspect of 365 is really the least relevant these days and I hear they offer it way below even operating cost to educational and public service organizations, because it's really the data they want.

Because with it M$ gains insight into the very heart and mind of every corporation, government, research body, school, club, family, not only get to see all their most secret know-how, but also in how it evolves in real-time. It's what M$ AI beasties are feeding on.

To me it's absolutely incomprehensible how anyone in his sane mind could allow the use of 365 for any more serios purpose than killing monsters for fun.

Just combine it with the social graphs from LinkedIn and the code on GitHub and it's much worse than any SciFy I've ever read.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

It's the illusion of an upgrade without the substance. The same is true for their office products. We don't need a new office suite every three years, except for security updates, but those are minor updates, which is why MS moved to an expensive subscription based model with 365.

Well you can find 365 Personal on sale on Amazon often for $50/year and it includes 1TB OneDrive, dark web info scanning, and 50GB/month VPN in addition to Office products on larger screen mobile devices and ad-free Outlook. That's a lot of value for half the price of Netflix a month. Sadly it doesn't include Microsoft Editor premium yet but that may be coming. I'm not a fan of the "You don't own it you only subscribe to it" movement but it's not like they're charging Adobe levels of insanity, or including Google One levels of uselessness for $4 a month.

Plus they haven't charged for a Windows upgrade in the last couple of versions...

 

[ThomasKinsley]

Well you can find 365 Personal on sale on Amazon often for $50/year and it includes 1TB OneDrive, dark web info scanning, and 50GB/month VPN in addition to Office products on larger screen mobile devices and ad-free Outlook. That's a lot of value for half the price of Netflix a month. Sadly it doesn't include Microsoft Editor premium yet but that may be coming. I'm not a fan of the "You don't own it you only subscribe to it" movement but it's not like they're charging Adobe levels of insanity, or including Google One levels of uselessness for $4 a month.

Plus they haven't charged for a Windows upgrade in the last couple of versions...

I purchased an office suite back in late 2011 for a single purchase price of <$100. Had I gone the subscription route at $50/year since then, I would've spent $650, but without sales it likely would've been $1,300. All for a measly office suite. That's highway robbery.