Then having less and less privacy is fine. And it's perfectly reasonable to trust Microsoft to implement this tool with honesty and care.
Storage and processing happens on your device and it is encrypted, so I don't see how this feature makes my information less private at all.
It seems like the actual issue people have is that they don't trust Microsoft or they don't trust the government/people/everyone.
Which is fine and understandable, it just isn't related to privacy.
Microsoft controls this entire process. They could easily send copies back to "the mothership" like they probably already do with the processed results.
> It seems like the actual issue people have is that they don't trust Microsoft or they don't trust the government/people/everyone.
Whether or not this invasion of privacy is cause for concern depends on your level of trust. But it is still a privacy issue.
Microsoft controls the whole operating system, they can already do whatever they want with your data. They could be sending screenshots back to the mother ship already.
I can understand why people may not trust them but they already have the keys to the kingdom. This new feature isn't any more or less private than Windows already is.
You can't possibly believe that. What am I missing here? Can you explain why this doesn't have everything to do with privacy? In order for it to not be relevant to my privacy, I have to trust the software spying on me and that Microsoft and the government won't use it against you if it benefits them in some way. I do not trust that, even though I also live a charmed life relative to most people in the world, I think. That doesn't mean I haven't read how, historically, government and other people of power are not to be trusted any more than absolutely necessary.
And probably ban the software you can already install to monitor someone's computer activity.
Isn't this argument just the classic "think of the children" dressed up in new clothes?
There's more at stake here than passwords. These repeated screenshots are essentially a slow, silent video of all computer activity. That has far more information than you may think it does. It compromises HTTPS content, it records data that otherwise would only be in RAM, ...I could go on.
I log in to an end-to-end encrypted chat with a family member. We talk about life and the subject drifts to plane tickets we already bought for next month and how the neighbor across the street isn't going to be home until the end of this month.
The thief who stole my laptop now has also stolen a recorded conversation along with my passwords. Now they know when two houses will be empty. This would not have happened without pictures of my screen being taken frequently.
I do agree that the outcomes in this case might be worse than an alternate universe without the recall feature.
That said, if someone steals my laptop and can log in, I am already pretty fucked. There are so many other ways they could get this or other information, from email, calendars, etc.
But the thief will also have your browser history, any saved passwords, and so on?
Note: this is basically already happening.
It's just the sad tripling down on advertising technology being our most advanced technology.
This is a huge distinction I want to point out: Nothing anyone has done in the past twenty years has been to make advertising more effective, though that is what is often claimed. The system however, only works towards making advertising more profitable to Google and Facebook. Everything else, including advertising effectiveness, has been slaughtered at the altar of "Gotta make line go up" inside Google and Facebook.
Both companies benefit greatly if the amount you spend on advertising goes up because it's not as effective as it used to be.
They also run most advertising as explicitly adversarial instant auctions, meaning the ad that runs before your Youtube video isn't the one most likely to get you what you want, or fix a problem you have, or even please your dopamine system, but rather the ad you see is primarily driven by who spends the most. This means that every midsized company that is so stupid as to misconfigure their advertising run will run a lot of ineffective ads, while the lean company doing innovative things locally who can only afford a "reasonable" ad spend will end up running far fewer ads.
The system empowers those with deep pockets and silences those without. Intentionally. This also makes it pretty easy to keep your new competition from getting any oxygen in a market.
I believe Google says that they include other things in the bidding process, including a specific claim that if you run a shitty ad that nobody every clicks on, it will be down-ranked in the ad auction, but they have billions and billions of reasons to not do that as effectively as they could. They are financially motivated to make advertising less effective and more expensive for consumers and producers alike.
It's not hard to imagine situations where this complete and total information package can be exfiltrated or otherwise abused. Roommates, stalkers, one night stands, domestic govt, foreign govt, domestic hackers, foreign hackers, computer repair techs, employers (seizing a personal device), etc, etc etc.
There is no scenario in a free society where this should be allowed or tolerated.
yes there is, I think you're lacking imagination. such a vision does require re-imagining a lot of what society is, and even of how we undertand ourselves relative to our many groups and super-groups which we belong to
Does an open source OS have an AI watchman? You can check! If yes, you can fork and remove it.
All that's happening here is the lack of control over your hardware and software is being emphasized a little further. Put another way, you already live in totalitarianism. Microsoft or Apple have de facto totalitarian control over your computer. They always did.
Should I not be allowed to use a password manager because it would be problematic if my roommate or one night stand copied it?
This isn't fundamentally different to any other feature.
You are free to use or not a password manager. What ms is doing is shoving things by force. It's not an opt in feature, their OS is becoming something ugly fast
This is why Windows has the "airtight hatchway" beyond which security against the user accessing their own data stops applying. Inside your login is by construction where your private data goes. Adding more of it shouldn't matter as it's all protected as the same. Like I agree that this feature is annoying but it's not a security risk, Windows promises no security against yourself.
Everything? I don’t understand the question. It’s obviously everything.
For now. It's not hard to predict that, sooner or later, Microsoft will want to send that information to be processed somewhere in the cloud (and of course, they will say that it's encrypted in transit, and will never be shared with anyone else...)
There's also a more fundamental issue: absent explicit recording, we treat everything that's output to the screen and speakers as ephemeral. Recording everything by default changes that paradigm. It's like having a hidden camera permanently recording on your bedroom: it's a place where we expect privacy.
> You shouldn't expect privacy on public or work computers. For all you know, they could already be doing this.
They could, but they shouldn't. It's like a hotel room: for all we know, it could have a hidden camera permanently recording everything that happens in it, but we still consider it a serious privacy violation when that actually happens.
> And if your laptop is stolen and they have your passwords, you're fucked anyways.
My laptop being stolen doesn't currently mean that the thief can know exactly what my screen was showing a couple of weeks ago.
This is very much like why it feels quite different to have automated license plate readers tracking and recording where your car has been - even though that is clearly public and visible by the fact that your car is driving down public roads.
I really don't believe that. It reminds me of the hysteria about Windows 10 telemetry (remember when people called it a keylogger?). Putting it in the cloud would cause huge backlash and brand damage. But somehow they're getting that backlash despite not putting it in the cloud.
> absent explicit recording, we treat everything that's output to the screen and speakers as ephemeral
Computer forensics experts would like a word. Your past activity has never been private from "yourself". The added privacy risk here is highly marginal. If I steal someone's laptop, I can Rewind and see what was in a PowerPoint slide they opened 2 weeks ago. But that PowerPoint is almost certainly still on the local drive anyway, so that makes no difference.
If the answer is anything else than "yes, I'm the absolute world authority on that" then you don't know how or whether Microsoft is respecting your privacy (same reasoning goes for Apple, for Google, for mobile phone radio stack, …).
If you don't trust Microsoft then yeah I can see why you wouldn't want this feature but you probably aren't using Windows in that case anyways, so it is a moot point.
What may be a moot point for me is not a moot point for millions of users. This feature seems to be enabled by default and needs poking into settings to disable.
Microsoft have proven time and again, by their acts and omissions, that they can't be trusted.
Relevant quote from the source: "During testing this with an off the shelf infostealer, I used Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — which detected the off the shelve infostealer — but by the time the automated remediation kicked in (which took over ten minutes) my Recall data was already long gone [ie. exfiltrated to a bad actor's device]."
any garantee on that ? or that will not change one windows update or two down the line ?
There is an unknown, but not zero, number of zero day exploits available _right now_ to do precisely this.
This is very much "cart before the horse" corporate thinking.
It's more in the feelings space than rational space, just like privacy in general
If all those things were true, then meh, fine. But for me, none of them are true, and it makes me truly happy to already be a happy Linux user.
I wish we could fork windows 10 and put whoever’s working on vscode and half of OneNote in charge of it.
It might be something I should expect, but I'd still slap my laptop over the head of my superiors if I found out that there was scren recording on employee computers. Regardless of whether it's legal, and regardless of whether I signed a form saying I understood that this was within their right. Any manager or corporate IT person who doesn't understand that actually implementing that would mean severe risk of being slapped in the head with laptops is clincally insane.
I agree there shouldn't be much privacy outrage for this particular windows feature so long as this is a local-only feature and I can disable it.
I am not at all confident that this is true. If we take Microsoft at their word, the raw data is stored on your device. But is processing ever done on Microsoft servers? Are the results of that processing ever sent to Microsoft servers?
Given that Microsoft is pretty aggressive about moving Windows to being an OS-as-a-service, it's hard for me to think that all the data Windows handles stays on-device.
I understand being concerned about Microsoft using it to target ads or moving it off device in the future But the four scenarios laid out in the article don't seem like a problem.
> You're using a public computer
> You're using a work computer
> You're using a shared family computer without a password protected profile
> Your computer gets stolen
You shouldn't expect privacy on public or work computers. For all you know, they could already be doing this.
Ditto for a PC where you share an account with other people.
And if your laptop is stolen and they have your passwords, you're fucked anyways.