Microsoft’s Recall feature recently made its way back to Windows Insiders after having been pulled from test builds back in June, due to security and privacy concerns. The new version of Recall encrypts the screens it captures and, by default, it has a “Filter sensitive information,” setting enabled, which is supposed to prevent it from recording any app or website that is showing credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other important financial / personal info. In my tests, however, this filter only worked in some situations (on two e-commerce sites), leaving a gaping hole in the protection it promises.
↫ Avram Piltch at Tom’s Hardware
Recall might be one of the biggest own goals I have seen in recent technology history. In fact, it’s more of a series of own goals that just keep on coming, and I honestly have no idea why Microsoft keeps making them, other than the fact that they’re so high on their own “AI” supply that they just lost all touch with reality at this point. There’s some serious Longhorn-esque tunnel vision here, a project during which the company also kind of forgot the outside world existed beyond the walls of Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters.
It’s clear by now that just like many other tech companies, Microsoft is so utterly convinced it needs to shove “AI” into every corner of its products, that it no longer seems to be asking the most important question during product development: do people actually want this? The response to Windows Recall has been particularly negative, yet Microsoft keep pushing and pushing it, making all the mistakes along the way everybody has warned them about. It’s astonishing just how dedicated they are to a feature nobody seem to want, and everybody seems to warn them about. It’s like we’re all Kassandra.
The issue in question here is exactly as dumb as you expect it to be. The “Filter sensitive information” setting is so absurdly basic and dumb it basically only seems to work on shopping sites, not anywhere else where credit card or other sensitive information might be shown. This shortcoming is obvious to anyone who think about what Recall does for more than one nanosecond, but Microsoft clearly didn’t take a few moments to think about this, because their response is to let them know through the Feedback Hub any time Recall fails to detect and sensitive information.
They’re basically asking you, the consumer, to be the filter. Unpaid, of course. After the damage has already been done. Wild.
If you can ditch Windows, you should. Windows is not a place of honour.