Recall: Stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible.

Stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code — inside the Copilot+ Recall disaster.

I wrote a piece recently about Copilot+ Recall, a new Microsoft Windows 11 feature which — in the words of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella- takes “screenshots” of your PC constantly, and makes it into an instantly searchable database of everything you’ve ever seen. As he says, it is photographic memory of your PC life.

I got ahold of the Copilot+ software and got it working on a system without an NPU about a week ago, and I’ve been exploring how this works in practice, so we’ll have a look into it that shortly. First, I want to look at how this feature was received as I think it is important to understand the context.

The overwhelmingly negative reaction has probably taken Microsoft leadership by surprise. For almost everybody else, it won’t have. This was like watching Microsoft become an Apple Mac marketing department.

At a surface level, it is great if you are a manager at a company with too much to do and too little time as you can instantly search what you were doing about a subject a month ago.

In practice, that audience’s needs are a very small (tiny, in fact) portion of Windows userbase — and frankly talking about screenshotting the things people in the real world, not executive world, is basically like punching customers in the face. The echo chamber effect inside Microsoft is real here, and oh boy… just oh boy. It’s a rare misfire, I think.

I think it’s an interesting entirely, really optional feature with a niche initial user base that would require incredibly careful communication, cybersecurity, engineering and implementation. Copilot+ Recall doesn’t have these. The work hasn’t been done properly to package it together, clearly.

A lot of Windows users just want their PCs so they can play games, watch porn, and live their lives as human beings who make mistakes.. that they don’t always want to remember, and the idea other people with access to the device could see a photographic memory is.. very scary to a great many people on a deeply personal level. Windows is a personal experience. This shatters that belief.

I think they are probably going to set fire to the entire Copilot

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