Windows File Discreetly Stores Touch Devices' Sensitive Text

[Lucian Armasu]

WaitList.dat keeps copies of all the document text that's ever been stored on your PC, once you enable the handwriting recognition capabilities in Windows 8.1 and later.

Windows File Discreetly Stores Touch Devices' Sensitive Text : Read more

 

[eza]

Do you have to disable the whole service or is turning off "improve recognition by sending data to Microsoft" enough?

 

[jakjawagon]

Just stopping the service won't be enough. If you do that, it will come back on the next reboot. You have to right-click, go to properties, and set startup type to disabled.

 

[jakjawagon]

Just stopping the service won't be enough. If you do that, it will come back on the next reboot. You have to right-click, go to properties, and set startup type to disabled.

 

[Christopher1]

This is less a Microsoft problem and more a "Application Developer!" problem. Why? Because no application developer who cared about security would ever save passwords in a plaintext file.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

Why is it even storing the text of documents anyway? Shouldn't it be using an image/vector database and focusing on individual letters, letter pairings, triplets, etc? Even if it needs an actual word database for comparisons, it would just need the words themselves, aka a dictionary. Not those words in order. Unless it's trying to predict the actual phrasings you would use, which goes way beyond handwriting recognition. Even then, there's no conceivable reason to include document metadata unless you're writing out file headers and footers by hand...

 

[phobicsq]

Windows has become such a privacy/spyware concen as well as forcing integration of programs.

 

[Michael Piazza]

I have a Dell touchscreen laptop and I did expect to find this file but I didn't even find the TextHarvester directory. Is there some trigger responsible for creating that directory and file? I don't use the touchscreen for much, yet.