News Total Recall: the only Copilot+ AI feature that matters is a huge privacy risk

[Admin]

The Recall tool takes screen shots of your activity every few seconds and keeps it, allowing you to query your activity. But it's also storing a lot of sensitive data.

Total Recall: the only Copilot+ AI feature that matters is a huge privacy risk : Read more

 

[DavidC1]

AI has always been about automating censorship and tracking every activity.

And it's massive, massive compute required is antithesis to what they claim on the surface, that it's all about the climate.

The fact that they contradict each other tells you they don't care about it, because it's just a ruse. Real thing has been about control from the beginning.

 

[rluker5]

Will this Recall have search results that are available across devices?
For example I don't want to let guests in the living room be able to get an answer as to what pn I might have been viewing.
Well maybe a few could, but generally I would prefer that most could not.

Edit: Also I have my living room itx and kitchen laptop set to start from sleep without a password because it is much more convenient in everyday life. And since some password requirements have gotten excessive I sometimes make my passwords visible to double check my typing. Not liking the sounds of Recall so far.

 

[watzupken]

This will hit a brick wall in some countries where privacy law is a big thing. I am glad my older hardware can't run all these crappy AI solution well. They talk about TOPS on your machine, but I don't believe everything runs natively and contained within the PC. LLM is always about data and its not going to change here.

 

[DavidMV]

Clearly Microsoft is getting a kickback from hardware manufactures. There is no legit reason not to allow people with powerful discrete GPUs to use these features without an NPU.

 

[Notton]

Yeah, when I saw this feature, my immediate thought was how to disable it.

Although, there are people who I am sure will like it, seeing as some people like to keep 10,000 tabs open.

 

[FoxtrotMichael-1]

I wish they would just stop. Nobody is asking for these features, nobody wants these features, and they’re horribly inefficient. As a software developer it makes me cringe so hard to think that they actually wrote this code that takes a screenshot every few seconds. Aren’t we supposed to respond to events asynchronously on a trigger?! Why are we wasting compute resources for this rubbish? Does anyone actually want their computer to be able to “recall” what they did on it? What’s more, is asking your computer to “recall” that one PowerPoint you were working on easier than looking in your Docs folder? Language is one of the least efficient ways of communicating - so why are we forcing computers into it?

Consider this: is it easier for me to ask “can you get the screwdriver with the green handle out of the third drawer from the top of my toolbox?” or just get it myself? The former requires more cognitive load than the latter. So why are we pretending this makes computers easier to use?!

At this point, I might just make my Amiga 600 my full time computer. I don’t need whatever it can’t do.

 

[Aurn]

I wonder how much this feature ruins your SSD by writing screenshots

 

[PEnns]

Which begs the question: If those "Recall" screenshots are to be stored locally (only, one would hope), will MS in its infinite wisdom make larger SSDs / HDDs another hardware requirement, say for Windows 12, 13, etc??

Who would want such an intrusive and risky feature is beyond me!

 

[greymaterial]

Companies nowadays consider heavily pushing unnecessary functionalities to replace critical features and make you pay extra for them, of course also removing the chance to roll back to more resilient old solutions by saying those pose "security risks" that are made by exactly themselves in the first place.

 

[rluker5]

Now the default enabled bitlocker makes more sense.

And it looks like AMD might have their mitigation for leftover locals (vulnerability that leaves AI accessed memory open to reading) available to the masses by sometime in July: https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-6010.html
It was supposed to be March, but got moved later. Also if it comes with a performance hit I imagine users will just go to a previous version of Adrenalin as usual.

 

[AngelusF]

Clearly Microsoft is getting a kickback from hardware manufactures. There is no legit reason not to allow people with powerful discrete GPUs to use these features without an NPU.

A discrete GPU has its own memory but the NPU uses the (normally) much larger system memory. Often it's memory shortage that limits the speed of local AI apps rather than the raw TOPS.

 

[DavidMV]

A discrete GPU has its own memory but the NPU uses the (normally) much larger system memory. Often it's memory shortage that limits the speed of local AI apps rather than the raw TOPS.

Many of the "AI" laptops about to be released have 16 GB of RAM. Why isn't my 16 GB GPU good enough? Because they are being anti-consumer, stop defending this behavior.

 

[Giroro]

"In it, you can see a Microsoft rep scroll through Recall's timeline and then ask it for "offer" which pulls up images of offers"

This person legitimately believes people don't just WANT the ads in Windows, but that they'll actively seek them out.

 

[edzieba]

Before we talk about Recall, why it's useful, and why it might also be a security nightmare, let's spend a moment on why you shouldn't care about the other Copilot+ features.

Well, there's one more feature that may be of interest to TomsHardware readers: "Auto Super Resolution", the previously announced device-agnostic-upscaler-for-any-game, is now not for any game (specific games only), is not device-agnostic, and is now limited only to Copilot+ devices, which means only the Snapdragon X Surface devices.

 

[slightnitpick]

Now the default enabled bitlocker makes more sense.

I don't think I'll ever encrypt my personal drives. I don't backup every day, but still care about my data. If things go bad I want to be able to access it as long as the drive is okay.

 

[USAFRet]

I don't think I'll ever encrypt my personal drives. I don't backup every day, but still care about my data. If things go bad I want to be able to access it as long as the drive is okay.

My Win 11 Surface Go 3 was encrypted from the factory, Day 1.

I don't even notice it, until Macrium Reflect tells me that, during the random full drive backups, it is backing up an unencrypted volume.

 

[slightnitpick]

My Win 11 Surface Go 3 was encrypted from the factory, Day 1.

I don't even notice it, until Macrium Reflect tells me that, during the random full drive backups, it is backing up an unencrypted volume.

Works as long as you're backing up consistently. I only back up every few months to an external HDD.

On a work computer I decided to create another partition and install a Linux distro recently. Had a scary minute, but fortunately this work computer was linked to a Microsoft account that I could access on my personal computer to get the BitLocker code from.

As I plan on never having a Microsoft or Ubuntu or whatever account that my computer is linked to I'm not going to be using BitLocker for the foreseeable future. Yes, I could write down the code, but that also is less secure against data loss than not needing a code at all.

 

[USAFRet]

Works as long as you're backing up consistently. I only back up every few months to an external HDD.

On a work computer I decided to create another partition and install a Linux distro recently. Had a scary minute, but fortunately this work computer was linked to a Microsoft account that I could access on my personal computer to get the BitLocker code from.

That Surface laptop only gets backed up every couple of months. It is just my little travel device.

Full drive Image off to a folder on the NAS, when I think about it.
Just that as it is backup up via Macrium, it is unencrypted at that moment.

 

[OneMoreUser]

I wonder about some of the other AI and the like which companies are busy sneaking in at our desktop already!

• In Chrome and Edge there is the option to use an enhanced spell checker, something made more appealing by the normal one by terrible. If you opt to use the enhanced one all text you edit in those browsers goes to the cloud for spell checking!
• If you use the offer in Chrome and Edge to let it auto translate foreign language websites, then all the text on those goes in the cloud. I know of people that view their health data on foreign language websites, like say a journal from something they had done on a holiday - lets just say it is not something I would do.
• Even if you disable Copilot on Edge, it will still offer to rewrite any text you select on a webpage. I haven't investigated, but I suspect where that text goes to be rewritten.

And then there is all the other stuff, like when you tag photos on some social media. Those tags will not only be for your own benefit, it is why even if you never upload pictures your self, most likely you can still be found in pictures others uploaded. And the same goes for pictures of your kids!

 

[TJ Hooker]

AI has always been about automating censorship and tracking every activity.

And it's massive, massive compute required is antithesis to what they claim on the surface, that it's all about the climate.

The fact that they contradict each other tells you they don't care about it, because it's just a ruse. Real thing has been about control from the beginning.

Who has claimed that AI (either the current LLM craze or in general) is "all about the climate"? Who exactly are "they" that are contradicting themselves?

 

[ThomasKinsley]

On second thought, I think MS did me a favor by not letting my PC upgrade to Windows 11. Thanks MS. You finally did one thing right.

 

[CmdrShepard]

I wonder about some of the other AI and the like which companies are busy sneaking in at our desktop already!

• In Chrome and Edge there is the option to use an enhanced spell checker, something made more appealing by the normal one by terrible. If you opt to use the enhanced one all text you edit in those browsers goes to the cloud for spell checking!
• If you use the offer in Chrome and Edge to let it auto translate foreign language websites, then all the text on those goes in the cloud. I know of people that view their health data on foreign language websites, like say a journal from something they had done on a holiday - lets just say it is not something I would do.
• Even if you disable Copilot on Edge, it will still offer to rewrite any text you select on a webpage. I haven't investigated, but I suspect where that text goes to be rewritten.

And then there is all the other stuff, like when you tag photos on some social media. Those tags will not only be for your own benefit, it is why even if you never upload pictures your self, most likely you can still be found in pictures others uploaded. And the same goes for pictures of your kids!

In Windows 10 onwards all keystrokes go to Microsoft servers by default (AI typing assist).

 

[USAFRet]

In Windows 10 onwards all keystrokes go to Microsoft servers by default (AI typing assist).

I've heard that multiple times.

Testing this, I do not see it.

A Win 10 VM VirtualBox guest, in a Win 11 Pro host.
Wireshark running on the Win 11, monitoring traffic.

Doing whatever on the Win 10, I do NOT, repeat do NOT, see "keystroke" traffic from the Win 10 system moving outwards.


Do you have any other evidence of this?

 

[rahmifa]

Reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror called "The entire history of you".