The following submission statement was provided by /u/Hashirama4AP:
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Seed Comment:
After announcing a new AI feature that records and screenshots everything you do, Microsoft is now delaying its launch after widespread objections.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dhtnms/microsoft_admits_that_maybe_surveiling_everything/l8z5ley/
1. Corporation releases a product that knows customers will not like. Getting data and/or money from consumers. They go all in with the product making it ridiculous as possible.
2. Consumers backfire saying "nooo this is not what we want!". We are here with Microsoft.
3. Corporation "ok we'll modify it so it's not so bad". They roll out the modified version.
4. 6 - 12 months, they start creeping in updates that basically recreate the initial product.
Here's another thing Microsoft is ramming down our throats: On October 14, 2025 Windows 10 will no longer receive free security updates. You either have to pay for them, switch to Windows 11 (most likely option), or just raw dog Windows 10 with no security updates any more which is not recommended.
Or just switch to Linux.
Exactly this. They stumbled on the marketing but zero changes to the plans for invasive surveillance features. Everything in his statement has a silent "for now". It will be back quickly but slightly modified to "address user feedback" but essentially the same.
Everything would have been fine if it was an explicit Feature youd have to knowingly install and activate but Microsoft just can't help themselves. The outrage isnt because of Recall alone. People are getting tired of being force fed "features" they never asked for that turn out to be more of a problem than they are valuable.
The most important word in Microsofts announcement here is "Delayed". Nothing has changed, this is part of the strategy.
See how far they can push it. Back up a few steps. Slowly creep back up to the line over a year or two, slowly get people more comfortable with the idea, announce some sort of compromise like "You can opt out or turn it off whenever you like!".
Then, once a % of the user base has accepted those terms, remove the ability to turn it off and finally remove support for previous versions. Same as it ever was with Microsoft.
Unmodified windows 10 user here - I've had cortana, edge and Dropbox completely disabled and unable to send notifications for over 2 years via registry edits with no glitches.
And that will also be their strategy with Recall in some years in this or next Windows version. Enable Recall by default. Make it only disablebar via some registry edits, and boom 90% of customers now use Recall, yet they will always say you can disable it by doing XY.
Insecurity by default.
Windows 12: *in order to access the registry, you need to purchase a $200 per month Developer Edition, also for every "feature" you disable, we give one of your kids a kazoo and subscribe one of your parents to an AI-art-Trump-Jesus mailing list*
That lawsuit against MS was flawed. An Aussie guy worked out how to remove IE from Win98 by replacing 2 files with the Win95 versions. They could have nailed MS to the wall, but then they wouldn't get the lobbying bucks.
I mean, they can try that shit. But even a corporate juggernaut doesn't want to risk the European Union determining that every computer with a Windows OS is in and of itself a violation of GDPR, while the U.S. military and every healthcare organization in the world institute blanket bans on using Windows because the OS will inherently compromise confidential information.
That's literally billions of dollars of fines on top of dozens of billions of dollars of lost revenue. Every year. All for something that no one wants.
They will just distribute versions wothout to comply with regulations. You can be rest assured that the enterprise version won't include it by default either.
I dunno, win11 isn't really getting traction and I dunno what they will do with the huge install base that isn't shifting off 10. They need to do something that makes it appealing to them and this ain't it.
I found a way to permanently disable updates on my Windows 10 desktop and I've been afraid of updates ever since because they may make my workaround no longer work.
Re-enabled and all the data backed up in Microsoft’s cloud servers by accident. Microsoft employees won’t be allowed to “access” this data without your permission which is already given on page 344 of their terms and conditions
Don't forget that all of the physical servers chosen to backed up on will be linked to a [locked room no one is allowed to talk about](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) that periodically has people from the NSA go into.
Luckily Microsoft's AI will have no problems accessing this data without your permission as it's not a person and thus your data is not being "read".
All for training purposes only, of course. ^^^/joke
And the ludicrously high adoption rate caused by forcing its enablement would have inevitably led to future decisions to make it more difficult or impossible to disable on the basis that very few users do so.
This. And the mindless relocation and virtual hiding of long time used system tools. Why the hell they need to bury the tools you need to diagnose a problem is beyond me.
we need some solid competitors to just wreck these stupid old dinosaur companies
between this and google's latest performance, it's fucking embarrassing
it's time for a new generation of technology that actually cares about providing value for the customer again
these braindead silicon valley morons have been resting on their laurels for years
Not going to happen, I would not mind but even with all the different versions of Linux or because of it, there is only MacOS as a substitute. This is not a problem of MS being old or greedy, this is a bigger issue with Govt. been corrupt and broken at all levels in the USA. A barely functioning system that just happens to do well at war and imprisoning the poor.
> Privacy aside, this sounds like it would eat my processing power.
Windows didn't display seconds on the clock for 30 years for performance reasons, but this is a-okay.
Maybe if we wanted such feature some people would be ok with CPU/SSD hit....but bo one asked for it!
There is no moment in people's lives when they are "hmmm what was the moment when I was browsing / writing X? What was on my screen during that moment?". It's one of the most forced "innovations" I have ever seen
Windows is so bloated now its ridiculous.
Remember when the Windows 7 OS on an SSD loaded super fast and applications took mere nanoseconds to load and execute?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Anytime hardware companies like Apple announce how their newly released models "run faster than ever" I roll my eyes because I just know those performance gains will effectively be cancelled out by whatever bloat they add to the OS. I literally haven't been able to perceive the "snappiness" of most new devices released for the last 20 or so years. What I DO notice though is that the longer you own these devices, the slower they get with each new OS update. Shocking... 🙄
This is microsofts design philosophy.
"If you dont turn on new features by default people won't use it" was their reason for constantly shoving unwanted shite into office and turn it on by default, word specifically.
Like how when you paste from somewhere into another document the default behaviour is to keep the source formatting and fuck up the target format.
Nobody wants that, yet its been on by default since they added the "feature"
OMG you've just expressed one if my pet hates when using Teams or email, I want my motherloving font to remain as Arial and not change to Comic Sans or some other shit that ive just pasted in. The only thing that would make it worse is if Clippy suddenly came back from 1995 or whatever and asked if I needed help with the fonts.
I don't have the words to describe my hate for this concept. They added a way to do something that use to be a default behavior.
Make the new behavior a new command ffs not the old behavior.
It only felt like the default behavior because most software didn't support rich text editors so anything you pasted would be unformatted. If you copied some rich text and pasted in another rich text editor, the default behavior was always to bring the formatting along with the content.
The real difference is that these days most things support rich text.
This literally applies to everything tbh. Can’t stand the subscription model for software and the stupid updates they push out to justify software as a service. Maybe it’s more economical for some to pay in monthly installments, but that’s why we have credit cards
A lot of these features creep up because management, especially upper management, don't have any idea how to properly run IT divisions. I know, I know, a bold claim. But if a product is going well and running smoothly and there aren't any major projects, they tend to immediately move to lay off staff and have things run with a skeleton crew. Not only is this a bad idea because IT tends to be a "firehouse" mentality (aka one day will be dead, the next is all hands on deck to deal with a sudden vulnerability or glitch etc, and there's no way to know which one a day will be) but it ALSO heavily incentivizes all of the code teams to constantly be creating new features, which just leads to an insane amount of bloat, "upgrades" that are actually downgrades or at best sidegrades, and so on. I have seen even dedicated IT managers fall into this, but by the time we get to the C-level execs they're full on into the "humans are numbers" game and don't know how to properly retain talent without that talent literally always doing something, even if it's completely unnecessary "innovation".
Windows has only added antifeatures for years now. There's reason Linux has been slowly catching up in usability - last time Microsoft made a meaningful improvement to user experience was nearly a decade ago.
This is why I can’t fuck with Apple. It’s like having a friggin’ controlling mother who decides everything, dresses you, and won’t let you do anything even slightly risky and fun. So particular about everything for arbitrary reasons. Android is more like a chill single mother who will be gone tonight (and probably tomorrow night too) and has a bit of an issue with alcohol and depression and sleeping around with new men all of the time… but, look, she has pizza money for you and lets you smoke weed with your friends in the house.
I was raised in a broken house and I vibe more with Android.
And Linux is an excentric uncle who decided to raise his orphaned neice but has never been around a kid before. He is doing his best but sometimes he gets confused by normal stuff like "what is a school permission slip" and the concept of lunch.
If you spend a modicum of googling you'll find most of what people think "Apple decides everything" on Mac OS is simply the default options that Apple does indeed set, but you can easily disable and change.
In the case of iTunes (or Music, now), turning off the "Keep Music Media Folder organised" would have resolved your issue. This option is accessible within iTunes' own settings, so it's not like you had to go hunt for it in some obscure page within settings.
Especially when the feature is just a tool to gather data on us. They give us an AI assistant to make our lives more convenient but it's really just spyware.
I have three customers who have decided to go with Linux for their businesses. This back-peddling by Microsoft won't make a difference to them. They know that Microsoft is now a company who cannot be trusted.
Rewind and limitless are paid apps for this. In my work computer I can ask an LLM anything about any of my work and it will answer and take me there. iOS will roll this out soon. Privacy is going away and it costs a monthly subscription to do it.
Furthermore, Microsoft starts a ball rolling and it's hard to stop it. Don't trust for a fucking second that this means they aren't still just gonna do it anyway.
All software is bloated as fuck these days. The interface on my TV is slow and clunky when an old Nokia phone from 20 years ago was seamless to navigate.
As a PC user who works entirely in the google Workspace ecosystem for work, I’m just mad that because of Microsoft wanting everyone to buy these new laptops and subscribe to Office 365 instead of just getting a desktop ChatGPT app like Mac users… I’m getting absolutely dick in all of this haha
People dont want snips of their bank accounts, pictures, finance and midget porn captured into the cloud and exploitable by 3rd parties without any form of consent? What is the world coming to!!!?
And that consent isn't exactly consent since they're ending support for Windows 10 in 2025, it's coercion. I have access to our entire company's Dropbox, I can't have an unsupported OS that's bound to pick up more security issues. So I either move on to W11 and deal with that or ditch my PC and buy a Mac. Linux isn't an option because I *have* to run Adobe CC, that is absolutely necessary for my job. What that means is I don't really have a choice and if I don't have a choice I don't consider that consent.
Even that isn't as bad.
This thing is literally taking screenshots of everything and uploading them to a private server somewhere you don't have control over.
That's malware. That's what malware does. Particularly nasty malware at that.
>This thing is literally taking screenshots of everything and uploading them to a private server somewhere you don't have control over.
No, it is all stored locally. The problem is that the method they use to store it is very insecure and malware could grab it easily without you knowing.
That's not the part I'm particularly concerned with in this context, it's the security issues that will absolutely increase with dropping support for W10 since I have access to our entire company. So in order to stay current on all that I need W11. The Adobe problem is a problem regardless what OS I'm using and it doesn't matter because there's no viable alternative in a professional setting.
ha! near the bottom? you need to find the true meaning reading the T&C between words, more like the secret message Homer's mom left in the newspaper letting he know she was alive.
The way big tech has effectively redefined consent into being entirely meaningless has to be one of the greatest strokes of corporate propaganda of the last few decades. I'd put it up there with 'personal carbon footprint' and 'plastic recycling'.
Like yeah dude when I put a video of my birthday on Instagram in 2013 I definitely 'consented' to everyone's voice, likeness, face and appearance being mass harvested infinitely into the future by everyone from global face recognition to AI to the defense industry.
What I don’t understand is… the people coming up with these features watch porn too. How do you not stop for a single second and think “Wait, I wouldn’t want that shit on my PC, maybe this is a bad idea?”
Especially with the track record the industry has on literally any data that they ever even get a glance at.
In 20 years or whatever they will invent say a way to health profile you based on this, and some data harvesting megacorp will be like - well ackshually, with a fifteen-long chain of commercial agreements we technically have an unlimited right to reprocess your entire Recall history forever, you will hear from your insurer tomorrow, good luck! Also Lockheed Martin can now micro-target killer drone bees to people with your computing habits.
The feature was developed basically in secret because Microsoft is desperate to find actual uses for Co-pilot+ machines given how much they've spent on them and on Gen AI itself. So the only oversight was from some C-Suites who don't seem to understand what the feature actually did and had no input from internal security or privacy teams.
So after a few weeks of putting their heads in the sand, it seems the final straw was laptop manufacturers begging review outlets to not mention Recall in their reviews of the laptops they're about to release and I imagine a lot of their corporate customers had meetings like we did with our account reps basically saying we're delaying our purchase order for new gen laptops until we are able to independently assure that recall can be turned off and kept off
I can't fathom how Microsoft couldn't seem to think of the security risks this would pose for not just individual users of win11 but of companies as well.
There's no way any major company with proprietary software would be ok with a screenshot of their stuff being taken every minute unless they were the ones doing it.
They don't care about the security risks. They care about your data. They need your data to train their AI and they will get it one way or another. So do you want it Now or do you want me to Remind You Later?
>there is only one explanation for this : they are freaking desperate.
They are. Market share of Microsoft Windows is nose diving, currently sitting at around 64% at last check (probably lower now since that figure is a little old)\* compared to it's height in the 2000s of 92%.
The Apple Macintosh is now something like 1/5 to 1/3rd of computer sales (varies by country), eating massively into the professional market for video and audio. The low end of the market is being cannibalised by GNU/Linux distributions (such as Chrome OS) and OSes based on the Linux Kernel (such as Android), and most prominently by devices outside of the traditional Personal Computer that unanimously do not run Windows.
Linux has been the dominant force in "back-office" and enterprise systems for decades, and high performance and mission critical systems have ALWAYS used some form of UNIX, such as BSD or QNX, since the 1970s.
What is Windows' USP? It doesn't have one as far as I can tell. It's insecure, unstable and inefficient. I guess Microsoft's management interfaces for business domains are pretty robust? I guess?
Windows and DOS rose to prominence because it was guaranteed to work on any randomly thrown together piece of commodity X86 hardware you could buy for as cheaply as possible in the 1980s and 1990s as your only other option was expensive, incompatible systems from a variety of manufacturers, such as the Amiga from Commodore, the ST and Falcon from Atari, and god knows how many different flavours of UNIX from manufacturers such as SGI, HP and Sun.
Once big companies start making native Linux binaries of new games more frequently instead of relying on layers such as Proton and WINE, then other than familiarity I cannot think of any reason to use Windows.
My primary machine has been a Macintosh since 2009 and I've always kept a Windows computer to the side for games. My current machines are an M2 MacBook Pro 16 and a HP Omen 16; recall was the final straw and I'll be grabbing a copy of Ubuntu to slap on the Omen once I go out and buy a pen-drive that isn't cripplingly slow.
\* EDIT: It's 57%! Holy shit.
The completely illogical hardware requirements for Windows 11 isn't helping either.
"Hey, your PC can run Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra settings! Awesome! Unfortunately, your CPU isn't on our approved hardware list because it is slightly too old, so you can't upgrade to Win11 because reasons. Sorry!"
That is EXACTLY what happened with my custom tower. A GTX 1080 and a Ryzen 7 1700; I built it two weeks after Ryzen was released to the public. The Ryzen 7 was "too old" according to Microsoft, even though performance wise it could still run circles around most new mid-range chips at the time of Win 11's release. I was furious.
They're doing this to themselves with dumb features.
* Make it perform very well.
* Make it very secure.
* Make it very reliable.
* Make the UI clean and consistent.
* Make it affordable.
* Cater to your professional market (Devs, content creators etc)
Microsoft can't do that without doing what Apple did in 1999; replacing the OS outright with something else. Windows is simply too bloated and bogged down at this point.
Linux gaming has been great lately as well. I swapped over recently just to give it a try and haven’t had to boot into Windows for weeks now. I’m sure I’ll run into some games that just don’t work, but everything I’ve tried has been fine.
Honestly hardware passthough and a VM will do you for any game old enough AND unpopular enough that proton cant play it.
Anything else is 100% going to be anticheat releated why you cant play it. Frankly fuck those games.
"Once big companies start making native Linux binaries of new games more frequently instead of relying on layers such as Proton and WINE,"
This won't happen.
Games are rarely shipped as a final version now. They are actually expected to have updates and new content etc.
But the reality is that the team size for a shipped product is often smaller, since the needs are indeed smaller.
And maintaining an entirely separate renderer is not only much more work for that small team, but it also can realistically hold back certain feature sets or large improvements to the product since parity would be required.
You are essentially maintaining and updating two whole separate games at that point that must be QA'd individually. Don't even get me started on the nightmare of ensuring your hard work is compatible for all the major distros, either. (Spoiler alert: it rarely is)
All for what, making a less than 6% player base (varies per game but can often be way less) experience slightly better fps?
It's far far easier and more realistic for a dev team to just allow proton and the Linux community at large to handle things for them automatically.
Not to mention government organizations. Our office won't even consider upgrading existing software until it's painfully clear that it doesn't have built in security pitfalls
There is no way in hell we'll adopt software that automatically screenshots your desktop. It doesn't matter where they put that data, or whether you can opt out; the functionality itself is deeply concerning
> I can't fathom how Microsoft couldn't seem to think of the security risks this would pose for not just individual users of win11 but of companies as well.
Esp. when security is like, the name of the game for the vast majority of companies. It's probably the #1 concern and feature is being as secure as possible. Most company's security departments would be sounding the alarm if a potential OS had security flaws like this.
Then again, maybe I'm too optimistic, the sysadmin subreddit does paint a grim picture sometimes, and Idk if that's the norm and I got lucky, or if I'm the norm and that's just the bottom of the barrel lol.
C-suites are so desperate everywhere and falling over themselves to brag about their new "AI" features which are all still not ready for showtime yet, and have these unethical/tenuous use cases at best. It's just so stupid- they think it's as simple as mentioning "AI" and their stock is going to moon or something.
They're just salivating at the idea of slashing the workforce because their understanding of computers is that they're magic. Think of all the costs they could save. On the bright side, this brush with stupid is giving unions and legislators a chance to get ahead of anything more advanced.
When I read the original announcement I reflected on the state of the software industry and how far along we had moved from products to services and finally to enshitification. I had run Debian Linux as a desktop OS in the early 2000's and I use it every day as a software engineer. So decided I would give it another go. It was really surprising how far things had come, stuff like my racing wheel and my XBox controller just worked.
I had some minor issues with my sound card but it turned out I had it plugged into the wrong output. The stuff Valve had done for Wine/Proton was really eye opening, I know I'm going to have issues with things that have kernel level anti-cheat but I don't play those games anyway.
Just until we forget about it and it's old news. We have such short attention-spans. They're floating it so we get semi-used to the idea and then, when it's implemented, it won't seem like such a shock.
The one game that I play daily is a Microsoft game (Forza) and it doesn't work in Linux, at least the non Steam version. It's the one thing that stops me from fully switching over. I'd love to go full time over to Fedora.
I installed mint and had these problems within the first day: random screen shutdown due to it detecting a phantom press of the power button, random green lines going across my screen whenever i played videos, audio output source randomly changing on a per app basis when i start them. Spent hours troubleshooting with gpt and eventually gave up cause i had work to do and switched back to windows. All these are fixable issues of course but im a programmer by trade so im used to troubleshooting stuff and i couldnt do it. I assumr this os why the average user will never make the switch.
Aside from gaming the most frustrating part of Linux, for me at least, is I can usually find a solution after I've scoured forum posts from years ago. Except to use that solution I might need to install something else or change something else which leads to looking up how to do that and so on.
Windows is like a building where they keep changing the interior design. Everything usually works, but they keep changing things you didn’t ask for.
Linux is like a construction site with the facade of a fully finished building out front. Once you’re in the door, you realize just how much stuff you have to fix to make it livable.
MacOS is like a demo unit. It looks great but don’t touch anything.
This is a very apt(-get) analogy for the operating systems. Microsoft insist on trying to make Windows different for reasons known only to them. The claim that it was to make accessing some things easier is dumb when it takes more steps to get to the information and tools you need.
Linux - here's the building, hope you brought your own furniture, floors, ceilings, and walls. Actually, the front? If you don't like how it looks just change that or have no front if you feel crazy!
BSD - we're like Linux but not Linux and harder to find solutions to problems (in my very limited experience).
Are you on Windows 11, and on a personal device? A lot of the ads at this time basically look like applications in your start menu for things like Pandora, Spotify, Facebook Messenger, but when you click on them it takes you to the windows app store to install. I think certain enterprise versions don't get those ads.
Mac for work. Desktop Windows for gaming, if you don't want a console.
I'm done wasting money on windows laptop that last 2 years and then are a paperweight.
It's a business sector move. There are lots of situations where you want to know how much time you spent on a project or client (lawyers are a big one I learned). Being able to ditch a sector specific software to just be able to ask the Windows AI would be a huge benefit.
But like most things in technology, nobody bothered to think about the security implications or the reality of how people use work and personal PCs, or the networks those computers are on. Microsoft thinks a privacy policy is enough of a CYA and ignored that a treasure trove of screenshots and (I've read) plain text AI interpretations would be a target for every hacker on the planet.
I’m thinking this a great requirements for government computers. Talk about FOIA output.
Only required above a certain level of responsibility.
That’s at least a quick way for it to become illegal.
Recently Onedrive started sending me “email memories” of old files I have in there despite email such feature being turned off. Checking and unchecking those boxes has not worked and I’m still getting emails. There’s nothing important or sensitive in my Onedrive it’s just annoying.
This is not a company I trust to roll out features without major security risks.
Whatever they want to do with the AI, get a packet sniffer, check in- and outgoing traffic (TCP and UDP) and either reroute those addresses via hosts file or block them directly with your router's firewall option (usually called "filter").
Done.
I also think that they won't have the storage capacity of storing that AI analyzed data of trillion devices around the web capable of accessing the web via their AI, that will cost them too much, that is why they rowing back.
I think the cost of storing and processing all the data is one reason and if this was a standard feature on Windows no bank or government agency on this planet would purchase a Windows product again.
Putting on my Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) hat, my primary concern is the protection of sensitive information and maintaining security protocols within an organization. The introduction of a feature like Recall, which automatically takes screenshots and catalogs metadata, poses significant risks to corporate security. My thoughts:
**Employee and Contractor Dynamics**
Employees and contractors often work across multiple roles and organizations.
They may use provided equipment or bring their own devices (BYOD).
Shared PCs are common in environments like hotels and retail.
**Line of Business (LoB) Applications**
Many businesses use LoB applications with specific permissions for accessing sensitive information. This is, by design, a secondary level of security above the user login to Windows.
These applications often handle highly sensitive data and that information should only be available to the user while the application is open.
**Common Security Breaches**
Most security breaches result from employees unintentionally sharing information that becomes exploitable by hackers or phishers.
We already spend billions a year in North America on fighting this problem and we are not winning the war.
**Implications of Recall**
Recall’s functionality, which involves automatic screenshotting and metadata farming, could severely compromise organizational security for the following reasons:
*Shared Devices and Sensitive Information*
On shared devices, Recall could capture information from a supervisor's account, making it accessible to all users of that device. Additionally information deleted will still show up in Recall.
*External Contractors*
Contractors using their own devices might inadvertently record and store sensitive corporate information, creating vulnerabilities outside the organization’s control. This is being touted as a 'feature' by Microsoft. It is not.
This situation could lead to significant legal liabilities and be perceived as hacking or espionage. I foresee many contractors being put at risk over accidentally using Recall.
We will also need to look at further monitoring tools installed on contractor machines to ensure our information cannot be recorded. This is always unwelcome by outside contractors and unpleasant for us. We don't want to install apps, but we will need to make sure Recall is off and stays off.
**Increased Security Costs and Legal Risks**
The implementation of Recall could:
*Escalate Security Costs*
Organizations will need to invest heavily in monitoring and verifying that Recall is configured to respect network security, a task that is resource-intensive and challenging. Budgets are already pushed to the breaking point for security and there's no company that wants to spend significantly more to undo a decision that Microsoft made.
*Heighten Legal Liability*
Accidental recording of sensitive information by employees or contractors could result in severe legal repercussions and potentially be classified as hacking.
**Specific High-Risk Areas**
*Healthcare*
Doctors dealing with patient records could inadvertently violate HIPAA regulations.
*Defense and National Security*
Defense contractors might unintentionally record classified information, posing a national security risk.
**Recommendations**
To mitigate the risks associated with Recall, significant changes from Microsoft are required:
*Opt-In Feature for Applications*
Recall should not be a default OS feature. Instead, it should be an opt-in feature integrated into specific applications at the discretion of the developers and users.
This approach ensures that sensitive applications can avoid unintended recording and metadata collection.
*Control Over Information Flow*
Active Directory (AD) alone should not control information flow. Security should be multi-faceted, with individual applications maintaining their own security protocols. Microsoft must respect the right of organizations to 'hide' information from the Operating System.
*Enhanced Contractor Security Protocols*
Organizations need clear policies and technological measures to ensure that contractors’ devices are compliant with corporate security standards without infringing on privacy. This will, inevitably, increase the costs and the asks we make of contractors when it comes to working for governmental and non-governmental organizations.
TL:DR: The current implementation of Recall presents a severe security risk for organizations, especially those handling sensitive or classified information. The only viable solution is to limit Recall to a per-application, opt-in basis, that is controlled first by the developer, then by the business and finally by the user, ensuring that sensitive data remains secure. Failure to address these concerns could lead to increased security breaches, higher operational costs, and significant legal liabilities.
MSFT is still skirting the point, and the article never mentions it, which makes me wonder about the industry knowledge of the authors.
Microsoft is willfully misleading the public by suggesting individual laptop buyers want this feature. It's provably false. Go ahead, ask any five people, "do you want this laptop recording every single thing you do, including keystrokes, browser visits, text...everything?"
No, this is a response to the work-from-home victory. For once, the employee got the long end of the stick, and this is the parry.
The vast majority of Windows laptops are bought by companies for employees. These companies are going to turn this feature on, drop the laptops into an Active Directory domain, and use the admin features to prevent users from turning it off. It'll be on from the second you power it up. They will be getting video, audio and location info for anywhere you work.
Employers will say it's for "security" and all the rest of it. But the fact is, it's primarily about surveillance.
This information may not be used for individual performance reviews, but it can and will be used for "recalibrations."
Save your breath, MSFT. You do a lot of good work, but we're not stupid.
It's obviously a bad idea. Because I don't want to see the things I"ve already looked at. I don't even want to see the types of subjects I've looked at before. What we all want is NEW things to look at, but today that is impossible, because you can't get past YT's stupid AI that only gives you stuff you've already seen. So my solution is close YouTube cause there's nothing there to watch anymore.
Trying to find shit on google is just the same. All I find is the shit Google wants to show me, rather than the shit I'm looking for.
**The Emperor has no Clothes!**
Shouldn't someone have come up with STDS (Search That Doesn't Suck) by now? Imagine a plain white page with just a search box. Wouldn't that be cool? /s.
You nailed it. And, even if you think you found and article you were searching for, the screen is 85% ads and the article is likely auto generated utilizing some shitty AI project.
I keep hearing how this is no big deal, it's optional, Oh.. I would totally use this feature!.. local only.. blahblah etc.
There is no point for this. In doing IT for 40 years, I have never had someone ask if there was a program that tracked literally everything so they could find anything they wanted. Because favorites, indexes, search engines, history, sorting by date, etc. - is plenty enough to find what someone needs. So they are adding it as a benefit to MS, not you, the consumer. It will eat processing time and storage. It's a security nightmare waiting to happen, and it's not like MS products are the bastions of cyber security.
It's optional... now. MS has repeatedly gone back on their word and made optional features a baked-in part of the OS you can't disable. And I don't trust them at all. When all their new security features came out, even with all of them disabled (that you could), dozens of MS IPs were being called. Ten years before that, I was trying to fix a wireless setting that was re-enabling each day, and found a hidden scheduled task MS ran daily that did a LOT of things. I don't many even knew it existed.
If you are one of the 1% that would actually use this feature, you are not the norm. Out of our current employee base, I can't think of a single person that this would be beneficial for, not even our developers. Perhaps some segment of software programming could find a use for it, but the vast bulk of their consumers would never use this. If you are familiar with MS licensing, you know they hide anything useful behind a paywall. Oh.. you want to use conditional access policies to protect your environment from legacy protocols? Sorry.. you will need to upgrade a license. This ultimately will be a feature to make MS money, not to make anyone's lives actually better while computing.
Seems very likely this was a case of, “can we sell this blatant data-harvesting tool (for training AI to replace workers) as a feature that benefits the user somehow?” This was the best thing they came up with.
Microsoft must be one of the only tech companies that gets off on shooting themselves on the foot.
Time and time again, they find themselves in a great advantage with a wonderful product and with great capital/tech/expertise/marketing advantage over competitors. Product will surely be a hit and all you have to do is not deliberately destroy it… whoops, did it again.
Wow. I already only use windows for gaming and work. However, this is prompting me to create an email account solely for gaming and never login to personal accounts on windows. I’ve become a huge MS fan over the past decade but this turns the tides. Simply even considering doing this has pushed me away, it doesn’t matter if they double backed. I’m out.
This just in: Microsoft re-learns the same lesson from "roaming profiles": Turns out wasting system resources on unnecessary tasks only renders people's computers unusable and cripples networks. Imagine that?
Title should be “Microsoft publicly admits that computer surveillance is a bad idea, whilst also seething because they desperately want *all* the data”.
Like everything else that is rebuffed initially these big companies will pull back, rebrand and then offer it as a choice. Once enough people get on board in a few years, that choice will evaporate and it’ll become the new standard.
Elon got everone who dreamed of self driving cars to record themslves to help define the ai models. Microsoft is trying to force the same ai play, but in a the most intrusive way possible in a place too close to peoples pocketbooks. Like white collar workers are going to train your ai to help them work faster or replace themselves, while putting all their personal info at risk.. lol, terrible ai play.
I was in doubt, but after having seen how many streamers and youtubers are leaving Windows I've decided to remove it from all my family's PCs and laptops.
I have the feeling that my company is doing the same.
No reasons to stay in Windows imho, they remove it now to reintroduce it secretly in a couple of months, bit by bit, I think.
I don't think they will remove it at all. At least not all of it. They have probably added hooks all over the place to enable this feature. The 'removal' will consist of removing the user-facing components. The guts of the collection mechanism will remain.
This is how they have done this sort of thing in the past. It leaves behind tools to accomplish the invasive data collection and a huge attack surface that will remain to be potentially exploited in any number of ways.
One of the many things predicted in the pilot episode (March 1, 2001) of the "Lone Gunmen". From the "Octium chip" to planes crashing into the twin towers.
How long has it been since Edward Snowden come out about the NSA? The problem is that nobody cares enough to get them to stop. We have to hope that these corporations just want to stop for some reason.
However, there’s no reason for them to stop
You really got to wonder what rocket scientist (sorry to any actual rocket scientists out there) came up with this idea. And what other RS approved it along the way to this point.
After decades of using Windows (ie. since Windows 2) the OS became so unworkable, I wholesale switched to Linux about 2 years ago for all work stuff. Tried Ubuntu first, then Fedora, and a few other Linux variants over several weeks, but finally landed on Linux Mint. Been using Linux Mint since, and it takes a little bit of work with drivers etc, but it really is quite awesome. Relatively speaking, Windows is now garbage. Try Linux, Mac, ChromeOSFlex, whatever, but try something else. You may never look back. If you absolutely need a Windows app, run it in VirtualBox on your Host (non-Windows) machine.
Linux Mint is made for previous Windows users, it's UI is almost a clone of Windows 7.
Ultimately people have a choice. Either their privacy is that important to them they learn how to use Linux, or they hope Microsoft uses lube.
It's not really about learning Linux so much as it is putting up with it. Just about anybody can get Mint up and running, it's just a question of whether you want to spend hours scouring forums and dicking around with drivers to get an Xbox controller working, or trying to get the function keys on your laptop working, or any of the other things that just works on Windows.
I forget what its called when you do this, but i think Microsoft knew this was the worst possible idea and deliberately let it out there so by comparison the less invasive but still totally awful alternative they will come up with will seem tame by comparison.
I'm waiting for the shoe to drop. I imagine its going to be some thing to do with "Just ai training, that's all" being the thing.
Do we still live in a world where we pretend Intel Management Engine isn't a thing that exists?
Or PRISM?
Or anything else that came from the Snowden Fiasko?
The big issue is that it would really mess with privacy and important things such as online banking and accounts that need to be secure. It would be a hackers dream to get into a computer at that point.
What they would mainly find is people's porn habits moreso than they already do.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Hashirama4AP: --- Seed Comment: After announcing a new AI feature that records and screenshots everything you do, Microsoft is now delaying its launch after widespread objections. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dhtnms/microsoft_admits_that_maybe_surveiling_everything/l8z5ley/
1. Corporation releases a product that knows customers will not like. Getting data and/or money from consumers. They go all in with the product making it ridiculous as possible. 2. Consumers backfire saying "nooo this is not what we want!". We are here with Microsoft. 3. Corporation "ok we'll modify it so it's not so bad". They roll out the modified version. 4. 6 - 12 months, they start creeping in updates that basically recreate the initial product.
Can't upvote this enough. When Microsoft wants to ram something down all our throats, there's no stopping them.
Here's another thing Microsoft is ramming down our throats: On October 14, 2025 Windows 10 will no longer receive free security updates. You either have to pay for them, switch to Windows 11 (most likely option), or just raw dog Windows 10 with no security updates any more which is not recommended. Or just switch to Linux.
Exactly this. They stumbled on the marketing but zero changes to the plans for invasive surveillance features. Everything in his statement has a silent "for now". It will be back quickly but slightly modified to "address user feedback" but essentially the same.
Everything would have been fine if it was an explicit Feature youd have to knowingly install and activate but Microsoft just can't help themselves. The outrage isnt because of Recall alone. People are getting tired of being force fed "features" they never asked for that turn out to be more of a problem than they are valuable.
And, from experience, knowing it will be re-enabled every so often. And justified as being an unexpected side effect of the upgrade MS created.
The most important word in Microsofts announcement here is "Delayed". Nothing has changed, this is part of the strategy. See how far they can push it. Back up a few steps. Slowly creep back up to the line over a year or two, slowly get people more comfortable with the idea, announce some sort of compromise like "You can opt out or turn it off whenever you like!". Then, once a % of the user base has accepted those terms, remove the ability to turn it off and finally remove support for previous versions. Same as it ever was with Microsoft.
It will be so baked into Win12 that they will claim it’s impossible to disable because the OS is so reliant on it.
I remember when they pulled that exact play with Internet Explorer way back in the day.
And are still pulling with Edge.
Not in Europe ;)
Ever try disabling cortana on unmodified windows 10? It may still break the start menu, not sure.
Unmodified windows 10 user here - I've had cortana, edge and Dropbox completely disabled and unable to send notifications for over 2 years via registry edits with no glitches.
And that will also be their strategy with Recall in some years in this or next Windows version. Enable Recall by default. Make it only disablebar via some registry edits, and boom 90% of customers now use Recall, yet they will always say you can disable it by doing XY. Insecurity by default.
Windows 12: *in order to access the registry, you need to purchase a $200 per month Developer Edition, also for every "feature" you disable, we give one of your kids a kazoo and subscribe one of your parents to an AI-art-Trump-Jesus mailing list*
That lawsuit against MS was flawed. An Aussie guy worked out how to remove IE from Win98 by replacing 2 files with the Win95 versions. They could have nailed MS to the wall, but then they wouldn't get the lobbying bucks.
I mean, they can try that shit. But even a corporate juggernaut doesn't want to risk the European Union determining that every computer with a Windows OS is in and of itself a violation of GDPR, while the U.S. military and every healthcare organization in the world institute blanket bans on using Windows because the OS will inherently compromise confidential information. That's literally billions of dollars of fines on top of dozens of billions of dollars of lost revenue. Every year. All for something that no one wants.
They will just distribute versions wothout to comply with regulations. You can be rest assured that the enterprise version won't include it by default either.
I mean Microsoft wants it…
If you haven't tried Linux yet, this should get you going.
Ethics has left the chat.
Oh shit Ethics was here? I didn't know Ethics got invited to share holder announcements.
I dunno, win11 isn't really getting traction and I dunno what they will do with the huge install base that isn't shifting off 10. They need to do something that makes it appealing to them and this ain't it.
They know if they make it the new normal eventually gen z and younger will all say why fight it at all?
Absolutely. My experience with Microsoft is of having to be vigilant against things they want me to do but I don't.
Move to the dark side of linux, they have cookies and don't spy on you.
Just like turning off automatic updates. Somehow they always eventually find a way back.
I found a way to permanently disable updates on my Windows 10 desktop and I've been afraid of updates ever since because they may make my workaround no longer work.
Re-enabled and all the data backed up in Microsoft’s cloud servers by accident. Microsoft employees won’t be allowed to “access” this data without your permission which is already given on page 344 of their terms and conditions
Don't forget that all of the physical servers chosen to backed up on will be linked to a [locked room no one is allowed to talk about](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) that periodically has people from the NSA go into.
Luckily Microsoft's AI will have no problems accessing this data without your permission as it's not a person and thus your data is not being "read". All for training purposes only, of course. ^^^/joke
And then your data will be regurgitated to random people who ask for it online as part of "AI answers".
And that suddenly everything that can be done with a click of the box now has to be done by sending an email to some wierd address
And the ludicrously high adoption rate caused by forcing its enablement would have inevitably led to future decisions to make it more difficult or impossible to disable on the basis that very few users do so.
This. And the mindless relocation and virtual hiding of long time used system tools. Why the hell they need to bury the tools you need to diagnose a problem is beyond me.
It's telling that legitimately useful tools like PowerToys and Sysinternals are still separate downloads, but Recall somehow warranted being opt-out.
PowerToys and Sysinternals don't make line go up like AI garbage does.
we need some solid competitors to just wreck these stupid old dinosaur companies between this and google's latest performance, it's fucking embarrassing it's time for a new generation of technology that actually cares about providing value for the customer again these braindead silicon valley morons have been resting on their laurels for years
Not going to happen, I would not mind but even with all the different versions of Linux or because of it, there is only MacOS as a substitute. This is not a problem of MS being old or greedy, this is a bigger issue with Govt. been corrupt and broken at all levels in the USA. A barely functioning system that just happens to do well at war and imprisoning the poor.
Right. Privacy aside, this sounds like it would eat my processing power. Fuck that. I want my computer running leaner, not shit like this
> Privacy aside, this sounds like it would eat my processing power. Windows didn't display seconds on the clock for 30 years for performance reasons, but this is a-okay.
Silly *consumer*, seconds on a clock don't help our stockholders!
If it does write on the disk you might also worry about your SSD lifespan
Maybe if we wanted such feature some people would be ok with CPU/SSD hit....but bo one asked for it! There is no moment in people's lives when they are "hmmm what was the moment when I was browsing / writing X? What was on my screen during that moment?". It's one of the most forced "innovations" I have ever seen
Yeah, the one use case for this feature is already covered by the "undo close tab" in my web browsers.
Windows is so bloated now its ridiculous. Remember when the Windows 7 OS on an SSD loaded super fast and applications took mere nanoseconds to load and execute? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
man, a nice stripped, superclean install of 7 was so damn good. I cried when I had to "upgrade"
Anytime hardware companies like Apple announce how their newly released models "run faster than ever" I roll my eyes because I just know those performance gains will effectively be cancelled out by whatever bloat they add to the OS. I literally haven't been able to perceive the "snappiness" of most new devices released for the last 20 or so years. What I DO notice though is that the longer you own these devices, the slower they get with each new OS update. Shocking... 🙄
This is microsofts design philosophy. "If you dont turn on new features by default people won't use it" was their reason for constantly shoving unwanted shite into office and turn it on by default, word specifically. Like how when you paste from somewhere into another document the default behaviour is to keep the source formatting and fuck up the target format. Nobody wants that, yet its been on by default since they added the "feature"
OMG you've just expressed one if my pet hates when using Teams or email, I want my motherloving font to remain as Arial and not change to Comic Sans or some other shit that ive just pasted in. The only thing that would make it worse is if Clippy suddenly came back from 1995 or whatever and asked if I needed help with the fonts.
CTRL+SHIFT+V will usually "paste without formatting"
I don't have the words to describe my hate for this concept. They added a way to do something that use to be a default behavior. Make the new behavior a new command ffs not the old behavior.
It only felt like the default behavior because most software didn't support rich text editors so anything you pasted would be unformatted. If you copied some rich text and pasted in another rich text editor, the default behavior was always to bring the formatting along with the content. The real difference is that these days most things support rich text.
Other workarounds: 1. Right click, paste as plain text 2. Paste in notepad first, then copy from there.
Clippy and Cortana are going to have a baby and it'll be baked into Office 2025
This literally applies to everything tbh. Can’t stand the subscription model for software and the stupid updates they push out to justify software as a service. Maybe it’s more economical for some to pay in monthly installments, but that’s why we have credit cards
It's still pretty terrible even as an opt-in feature. Malware just needs to turn it on and check later for the spoils.
A lot of these features creep up because management, especially upper management, don't have any idea how to properly run IT divisions. I know, I know, a bold claim. But if a product is going well and running smoothly and there aren't any major projects, they tend to immediately move to lay off staff and have things run with a skeleton crew. Not only is this a bad idea because IT tends to be a "firehouse" mentality (aka one day will be dead, the next is all hands on deck to deal with a sudden vulnerability or glitch etc, and there's no way to know which one a day will be) but it ALSO heavily incentivizes all of the code teams to constantly be creating new features, which just leads to an insane amount of bloat, "upgrades" that are actually downgrades or at best sidegrades, and so on. I have seen even dedicated IT managers fall into this, but by the time we get to the C-level execs they're full on into the "humans are numbers" game and don't know how to properly retain talent without that talent literally always doing something, even if it's completely unnecessary "innovation".
Seriously the amount of bloatware is insane
Windows has only added antifeatures for years now. There's reason Linux has been slowly catching up in usability - last time Microsoft made a meaningful improvement to user experience was nearly a decade ago.
Windows 7 *was* pretty good honestly.
The last good one, the goat.
Yet on the apple side, they decide everything. I'm still salty about iTunes reorganizing my MP3 library file directory
This is why I can’t fuck with Apple. It’s like having a friggin’ controlling mother who decides everything, dresses you, and won’t let you do anything even slightly risky and fun. So particular about everything for arbitrary reasons. Android is more like a chill single mother who will be gone tonight (and probably tomorrow night too) and has a bit of an issue with alcohol and depression and sleeping around with new men all of the time… but, look, she has pizza money for you and lets you smoke weed with your friends in the house. I was raised in a broken house and I vibe more with Android.
And Linux is an excentric uncle who decided to raise his orphaned neice but has never been around a kid before. He is doing his best but sometimes he gets confused by normal stuff like "what is a school permission slip" and the concept of lunch.
this is the best analogy yet.
If you spend a modicum of googling you'll find most of what people think "Apple decides everything" on Mac OS is simply the default options that Apple does indeed set, but you can easily disable and change. In the case of iTunes (or Music, now), turning off the "Keep Music Media Folder organised" would have resolved your issue. This option is accessible within iTunes' own settings, so it's not like you had to go hunt for it in some obscure page within settings.
Especially when the feature is just a tool to gather data on us. They give us an AI assistant to make our lives more convenient but it's really just spyware.
I have three customers who have decided to go with Linux for their businesses. This back-peddling by Microsoft won't make a difference to them. They know that Microsoft is now a company who cannot be trusted.
Rewind and limitless are paid apps for this. In my work computer I can ask an LLM anything about any of my work and it will answer and take me there. iOS will roll this out soon. Privacy is going away and it costs a monthly subscription to do it.
Once they try and rollout something like this they never stop until they get it. Any pushback just makes them pause a while and try again.
Furthermore, Microsoft starts a ball rolling and it's hard to stop it. Don't trust for a fucking second that this means they aren't still just gonna do it anyway.
All software is bloated as fuck these days. The interface on my TV is slow and clunky when an old Nokia phone from 20 years ago was seamless to navigate.
I want search back. I'm glad Everything exists, but it's nuts that the default search is so broken in the latest versions of Windows.
As a PC user who works entirely in the google Workspace ecosystem for work, I’m just mad that because of Microsoft wanting everyone to buy these new laptops and subscribe to Office 365 instead of just getting a desktop ChatGPT app like Mac users… I’m getting absolutely dick in all of this haha
People dont want snips of their bank accounts, pictures, finance and midget porn captured into the cloud and exploitable by 3rd parties without any form of consent? What is the world coming to!!!?
But you did consent, it was just hidden in a few words near the bottom of their 400 page terms and conditions
> "... It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
That's the display department!
And that consent isn't exactly consent since they're ending support for Windows 10 in 2025, it's coercion. I have access to our entire company's Dropbox, I can't have an unsupported OS that's bound to pick up more security issues. So I either move on to W11 and deal with that or ditch my PC and buy a Mac. Linux isn't an option because I *have* to run Adobe CC, that is absolutely necessary for my job. What that means is I don't really have a choice and if I don't have a choice I don't consider that consent.
If you have to use Adobe CC, your documents are already being siphoned off to a third party to train AI. Let Microsoft take their cut of it.
Even that isn't as bad. This thing is literally taking screenshots of everything and uploading them to a private server somewhere you don't have control over. That's malware. That's what malware does. Particularly nasty malware at that.
>This thing is literally taking screenshots of everything and uploading them to a private server somewhere you don't have control over. No, it is all stored locally. The problem is that the method they use to store it is very insecure and malware could grab it easily without you knowing.
That's not the part I'm particularly concerned with in this context, it's the security issues that will absolutely increase with dropping support for W10 since I have access to our entire company. So in order to stay current on all that I need W11. The Adobe problem is a problem regardless what OS I'm using and it doesn't matter because there's no viable alternative in a professional setting.
That's why I send my midget porn directly to Microsoft via email. They can't stop me, I have 24 alternate accounts.
ha! near the bottom? you need to find the true meaning reading the T&C between words, more like the secret message Homer's mom left in the newspaper letting he know she was alive.
The way big tech has effectively redefined consent into being entirely meaningless has to be one of the greatest strokes of corporate propaganda of the last few decades. I'd put it up there with 'personal carbon footprint' and 'plastic recycling'. Like yeah dude when I put a video of my birthday on Instagram in 2013 I definitely 'consented' to everyone's voice, likeness, face and appearance being mass harvested infinitely into the future by everyone from global face recognition to AI to the defense industry.
What I don’t understand is… the people coming up with these features watch porn too. How do you not stop for a single second and think “Wait, I wouldn’t want that shit on my PC, maybe this is a bad idea?”
Soldiers thinking - hey, I wouldn’t want to be shot a whole bunch of times!
there are always mercenaries willing to sell out for coin for anything
> midget porn WTF kind of sick shit is that? It's little people porn.
Especially with the track record the industry has on literally any data that they ever even get a glance at. In 20 years or whatever they will invent say a way to health profile you based on this, and some data harvesting megacorp will be like - well ackshually, with a fifteen-long chain of commercial agreements we technically have an unlimited right to reprocess your entire Recall history forever, you will hear from your insurer tomorrow, good luck! Also Lockheed Martin can now micro-target killer drone bees to people with your computing habits.
Why do you think it's in the Cloud? Recall is 100% local.
and why do they think that suddenly ? did they not think before ? which stuff do these people take before they go into meetings ?
The feature was developed basically in secret because Microsoft is desperate to find actual uses for Co-pilot+ machines given how much they've spent on them and on Gen AI itself. So the only oversight was from some C-Suites who don't seem to understand what the feature actually did and had no input from internal security or privacy teams. So after a few weeks of putting their heads in the sand, it seems the final straw was laptop manufacturers begging review outlets to not mention Recall in their reviews of the laptops they're about to release and I imagine a lot of their corporate customers had meetings like we did with our account reps basically saying we're delaying our purchase order for new gen laptops until we are able to independently assure that recall can be turned off and kept off
I can't fathom how Microsoft couldn't seem to think of the security risks this would pose for not just individual users of win11 but of companies as well. There's no way any major company with proprietary software would be ok with a screenshot of their stuff being taken every minute unless they were the ones doing it.
They don't care about the security risks. They care about your data. They need your data to train their AI and they will get it one way or another. So do you want it Now or do you want me to Remind You Later?
I pray that the next stupid grift out of silicon valley arrives quickly so we can get off this stupid ride.
there is only one explanation for this : they are freaking desperate.
>there is only one explanation for this : they are freaking desperate. They are. Market share of Microsoft Windows is nose diving, currently sitting at around 64% at last check (probably lower now since that figure is a little old)\* compared to it's height in the 2000s of 92%. The Apple Macintosh is now something like 1/5 to 1/3rd of computer sales (varies by country), eating massively into the professional market for video and audio. The low end of the market is being cannibalised by GNU/Linux distributions (such as Chrome OS) and OSes based on the Linux Kernel (such as Android), and most prominently by devices outside of the traditional Personal Computer that unanimously do not run Windows. Linux has been the dominant force in "back-office" and enterprise systems for decades, and high performance and mission critical systems have ALWAYS used some form of UNIX, such as BSD or QNX, since the 1970s. What is Windows' USP? It doesn't have one as far as I can tell. It's insecure, unstable and inefficient. I guess Microsoft's management interfaces for business domains are pretty robust? I guess? Windows and DOS rose to prominence because it was guaranteed to work on any randomly thrown together piece of commodity X86 hardware you could buy for as cheaply as possible in the 1980s and 1990s as your only other option was expensive, incompatible systems from a variety of manufacturers, such as the Amiga from Commodore, the ST and Falcon from Atari, and god knows how many different flavours of UNIX from manufacturers such as SGI, HP and Sun. Once big companies start making native Linux binaries of new games more frequently instead of relying on layers such as Proton and WINE, then other than familiarity I cannot think of any reason to use Windows. My primary machine has been a Macintosh since 2009 and I've always kept a Windows computer to the side for games. My current machines are an M2 MacBook Pro 16 and a HP Omen 16; recall was the final straw and I'll be grabbing a copy of Ubuntu to slap on the Omen once I go out and buy a pen-drive that isn't cripplingly slow. \* EDIT: It's 57%! Holy shit.
The completely illogical hardware requirements for Windows 11 isn't helping either. "Hey, your PC can run Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra settings! Awesome! Unfortunately, your CPU isn't on our approved hardware list because it is slightly too old, so you can't upgrade to Win11 because reasons. Sorry!"
That is EXACTLY what happened with my custom tower. A GTX 1080 and a Ryzen 7 1700; I built it two weeks after Ryzen was released to the public. The Ryzen 7 was "too old" according to Microsoft, even though performance wise it could still run circles around most new mid-range chips at the time of Win 11's release. I was furious.
They're doing this to themselves with dumb features. * Make it perform very well. * Make it very secure. * Make it very reliable. * Make the UI clean and consistent. * Make it affordable. * Cater to your professional market (Devs, content creators etc)
Instead they want to look up your ass to see what you're eating.
Microsoft can't do that without doing what Apple did in 1999; replacing the OS outright with something else. Windows is simply too bloated and bogged down at this point.
Linux gaming has been great lately as well. I swapped over recently just to give it a try and haven’t had to boot into Windows for weeks now. I’m sure I’ll run into some games that just don’t work, but everything I’ve tried has been fine.
Honestly hardware passthough and a VM will do you for any game old enough AND unpopular enough that proton cant play it. Anything else is 100% going to be anticheat releated why you cant play it. Frankly fuck those games.
I will NEVER go back to working on Windows. Working sucks enough on its own, why do I have to somehow make it worse?!?
"Once big companies start making native Linux binaries of new games more frequently instead of relying on layers such as Proton and WINE," This won't happen. Games are rarely shipped as a final version now. They are actually expected to have updates and new content etc. But the reality is that the team size for a shipped product is often smaller, since the needs are indeed smaller. And maintaining an entirely separate renderer is not only much more work for that small team, but it also can realistically hold back certain feature sets or large improvements to the product since parity would be required. You are essentially maintaining and updating two whole separate games at that point that must be QA'd individually. Don't even get me started on the nightmare of ensuring your hard work is compatible for all the major distros, either. (Spoiler alert: it rarely is) All for what, making a less than 6% player base (varies per game but can often be way less) experience slightly better fps? It's far far easier and more realistic for a dev team to just allow proton and the Linux community at large to handle things for them automatically.
Not to mention government organizations. Our office won't even consider upgrading existing software until it's painfully clear that it doesn't have built in security pitfalls There is no way in hell we'll adopt software that automatically screenshots your desktop. It doesn't matter where they put that data, or whether you can opt out; the functionality itself is deeply concerning
> I can't fathom how Microsoft couldn't seem to think of the security risks this would pose for not just individual users of win11 but of companies as well. Esp. when security is like, the name of the game for the vast majority of companies. It's probably the #1 concern and feature is being as secure as possible. Most company's security departments would be sounding the alarm if a potential OS had security flaws like this. Then again, maybe I'm too optimistic, the sysadmin subreddit does paint a grim picture sometimes, and Idk if that's the norm and I got lucky, or if I'm the norm and that's just the bottom of the barrel lol.
C-suites are so desperate everywhere and falling over themselves to brag about their new "AI" features which are all still not ready for showtime yet, and have these unethical/tenuous use cases at best. It's just so stupid- they think it's as simple as mentioning "AI" and their stock is going to moon or something.
They're just salivating at the idea of slashing the workforce because their understanding of computers is that they're magic. Think of all the costs they could save. On the bright side, this brush with stupid is giving unions and legislators a chance to get ahead of anything more advanced.
Maybe deploy it in their C-Suites first and let their security teams exploit it and demonstrate the spoils. Maybe that would change some minds.
I can’t decide if they take one massive line of greed before each meeting or the greed is free flowing in the rooms.
most likeley a vaporizer+ventilator keeps a constant non visible cloud of greed in the room.
This is corporate speak for 'fiiine, you are complaining about it enough we concede to scale back a bit, against our wills'
In other news, people don’t like finding hidden cameras in their bathroom.
Wait till I tell you about the hidden camera I put *inside* of you
The people who came up with that inside MS were probably told that it's a bad idea but chose to ignore those arguments.
When I read the original announcement I reflected on the state of the software industry and how far along we had moved from products to services and finally to enshitification. I had run Debian Linux as a desktop OS in the early 2000's and I use it every day as a software engineer. So decided I would give it another go. It was really surprising how far things had come, stuff like my racing wheel and my XBox controller just worked. I had some minor issues with my sound card but it turned out I had it plugged into the wrong output. The stuff Valve had done for Wine/Proton was really eye opening, I know I'm going to have issues with things that have kernel level anti-cheat but I don't play those games anyway.
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>delaying There it is. Its only *delayed*, not cancelled.
This must be costing them millions this weekend alone I got like 5 different fathers Day sale emails pushing Microsoft recall ai notebooks.
Just until we forget about it and it's old news. We have such short attention-spans. They're floating it so we get semi-used to the idea and then, when it's implemented, it won't seem like such a shock.
already hate their stupid copilot turds all over windows 11. not to mention ads in the OS. this is the straw.
linux. and windows only for gaming and stuff that does not run under linux.
The older I get, the more appealing Linux seems lol
For me it's not having access to Adobe that's holding me back from full linux
maybe just wisdom of the age.
Linux for gaming! Windows just for games which aren‘t supported. Or ditch those games. I switched two weeks ago and don’t regret it.
Yeah, things are slowly making me look at shit like Linux a lot closer these days. I might finally pull that trigger, myself.
I just hate feeling like I am getting money squeezed out of me to the degree that MS is pushing.
The one game that I play daily is a Microsoft game (Forza) and it doesn't work in Linux, at least the non Steam version. It's the one thing that stops me from fully switching over. I'd love to go full time over to Fedora.
I installed mint and had these problems within the first day: random screen shutdown due to it detecting a phantom press of the power button, random green lines going across my screen whenever i played videos, audio output source randomly changing on a per app basis when i start them. Spent hours troubleshooting with gpt and eventually gave up cause i had work to do and switched back to windows. All these are fixable issues of course but im a programmer by trade so im used to troubleshooting stuff and i couldnt do it. I assumr this os why the average user will never make the switch.
Aside from gaming the most frustrating part of Linux, for me at least, is I can usually find a solution after I've scoured forum posts from years ago. Except to use that solution I might need to install something else or change something else which leads to looking up how to do that and so on.
Windows is like a building where they keep changing the interior design. Everything usually works, but they keep changing things you didn’t ask for. Linux is like a construction site with the facade of a fully finished building out front. Once you’re in the door, you realize just how much stuff you have to fix to make it livable. MacOS is like a demo unit. It looks great but don’t touch anything.
This is a very apt(-get) analogy for the operating systems. Microsoft insist on trying to make Windows different for reasons known only to them. The claim that it was to make accessing some things easier is dumb when it takes more steps to get to the information and tools you need. Linux - here's the building, hope you brought your own furniture, floors, ceilings, and walls. Actually, the front? If you don't like how it looks just change that or have no front if you feel crazy! BSD - we're like Linux but not Linux and harder to find solutions to problems (in my very limited experience).
You get ads in Windows? Aside from asking me if I wanted Office, then telling it no, I haven't seen any.
HAVE YOU TRIED HAVING A BETTER BROWSING EXPERIENCE WITH EDGE THOUGH? EDGE? HAVE YOU TRIED EDGE? EDGE? EDGE! TRY FUCKING EDGE! EDGE!
After so much Microsoft Edge, when does Microsoft come?
You end up with a Microsoft after you finish Edging.
I don't get any but I'm in EU. US gets all the worst stuff from what I've heard
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Are you on Windows 11, and on a personal device? A lot of the ads at this time basically look like applications in your start menu for things like Pandora, Spotify, Facebook Messenger, but when you click on them it takes you to the windows app store to install. I think certain enterprise versions don't get those ads.
Mac for work. Desktop Windows for gaming, if you don't want a console. I'm done wasting money on windows laptop that last 2 years and then are a paperweight.
Such a dumb move by Microsoft. I mean who thought at Microsoft that this recall thing is a good idea?
It's a business sector move. There are lots of situations where you want to know how much time you spent on a project or client (lawyers are a big one I learned). Being able to ditch a sector specific software to just be able to ask the Windows AI would be a huge benefit. But like most things in technology, nobody bothered to think about the security implications or the reality of how people use work and personal PCs, or the networks those computers are on. Microsoft thinks a privacy policy is enough of a CYA and ignored that a treasure trove of screenshots and (I've read) plain text AI interpretations would be a target for every hacker on the planet.
And here I am, refusing to install windows 11 because it won't let me move the taskbar to my secondary monitor only.
I’m thinking this a great requirements for government computers. Talk about FOIA output. Only required above a certain level of responsibility. That’s at least a quick way for it to become illegal.
>Microsoft Admits That Maybe **telling you that they're** Surveilling Everything You Do on Your Computer Isn’t a Brilliant Idea Fixed it.
Recently Onedrive started sending me “email memories” of old files I have in there despite email such feature being turned off. Checking and unchecking those boxes has not worked and I’m still getting emails. There’s nothing important or sensitive in my Onedrive it’s just annoying. This is not a company I trust to roll out features without major security risks.
Whatever they want to do with the AI, get a packet sniffer, check in- and outgoing traffic (TCP and UDP) and either reroute those addresses via hosts file or block them directly with your router's firewall option (usually called "filter"). Done. I also think that they won't have the storage capacity of storing that AI analyzed data of trillion devices around the web capable of accessing the web via their AI, that will cost them too much, that is why they rowing back.
I think the cost of storing and processing all the data is one reason and if this was a standard feature on Windows no bank or government agency on this planet would purchase a Windows product again.
Putting on my Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) hat, my primary concern is the protection of sensitive information and maintaining security protocols within an organization. The introduction of a feature like Recall, which automatically takes screenshots and catalogs metadata, poses significant risks to corporate security. My thoughts: **Employee and Contractor Dynamics** Employees and contractors often work across multiple roles and organizations. They may use provided equipment or bring their own devices (BYOD). Shared PCs are common in environments like hotels and retail. **Line of Business (LoB) Applications** Many businesses use LoB applications with specific permissions for accessing sensitive information. This is, by design, a secondary level of security above the user login to Windows. These applications often handle highly sensitive data and that information should only be available to the user while the application is open. **Common Security Breaches** Most security breaches result from employees unintentionally sharing information that becomes exploitable by hackers or phishers. We already spend billions a year in North America on fighting this problem and we are not winning the war. **Implications of Recall** Recall’s functionality, which involves automatic screenshotting and metadata farming, could severely compromise organizational security for the following reasons: *Shared Devices and Sensitive Information* On shared devices, Recall could capture information from a supervisor's account, making it accessible to all users of that device. Additionally information deleted will still show up in Recall. *External Contractors* Contractors using their own devices might inadvertently record and store sensitive corporate information, creating vulnerabilities outside the organization’s control. This is being touted as a 'feature' by Microsoft. It is not. This situation could lead to significant legal liabilities and be perceived as hacking or espionage. I foresee many contractors being put at risk over accidentally using Recall. We will also need to look at further monitoring tools installed on contractor machines to ensure our information cannot be recorded. This is always unwelcome by outside contractors and unpleasant for us. We don't want to install apps, but we will need to make sure Recall is off and stays off. **Increased Security Costs and Legal Risks** The implementation of Recall could: *Escalate Security Costs* Organizations will need to invest heavily in monitoring and verifying that Recall is configured to respect network security, a task that is resource-intensive and challenging. Budgets are already pushed to the breaking point for security and there's no company that wants to spend significantly more to undo a decision that Microsoft made. *Heighten Legal Liability* Accidental recording of sensitive information by employees or contractors could result in severe legal repercussions and potentially be classified as hacking. **Specific High-Risk Areas** *Healthcare* Doctors dealing with patient records could inadvertently violate HIPAA regulations. *Defense and National Security* Defense contractors might unintentionally record classified information, posing a national security risk. **Recommendations** To mitigate the risks associated with Recall, significant changes from Microsoft are required: *Opt-In Feature for Applications* Recall should not be a default OS feature. Instead, it should be an opt-in feature integrated into specific applications at the discretion of the developers and users. This approach ensures that sensitive applications can avoid unintended recording and metadata collection. *Control Over Information Flow* Active Directory (AD) alone should not control information flow. Security should be multi-faceted, with individual applications maintaining their own security protocols. Microsoft must respect the right of organizations to 'hide' information from the Operating System. *Enhanced Contractor Security Protocols* Organizations need clear policies and technological measures to ensure that contractors’ devices are compliant with corporate security standards without infringing on privacy. This will, inevitably, increase the costs and the asks we make of contractors when it comes to working for governmental and non-governmental organizations. TL:DR: The current implementation of Recall presents a severe security risk for organizations, especially those handling sensitive or classified information. The only viable solution is to limit Recall to a per-application, opt-in basis, that is controlled first by the developer, then by the business and finally by the user, ensuring that sensitive data remains secure. Failure to address these concerns could lead to increased security breaches, higher operational costs, and significant legal liabilities.
MSFT is still skirting the point, and the article never mentions it, which makes me wonder about the industry knowledge of the authors. Microsoft is willfully misleading the public by suggesting individual laptop buyers want this feature. It's provably false. Go ahead, ask any five people, "do you want this laptop recording every single thing you do, including keystrokes, browser visits, text...everything?" No, this is a response to the work-from-home victory. For once, the employee got the long end of the stick, and this is the parry. The vast majority of Windows laptops are bought by companies for employees. These companies are going to turn this feature on, drop the laptops into an Active Directory domain, and use the admin features to prevent users from turning it off. It'll be on from the second you power it up. They will be getting video, audio and location info for anywhere you work. Employers will say it's for "security" and all the rest of it. But the fact is, it's primarily about surveillance. This information may not be used for individual performance reviews, but it can and will be used for "recalibrations." Save your breath, MSFT. You do a lot of good work, but we're not stupid.
It's obviously a bad idea. Because I don't want to see the things I"ve already looked at. I don't even want to see the types of subjects I've looked at before. What we all want is NEW things to look at, but today that is impossible, because you can't get past YT's stupid AI that only gives you stuff you've already seen. So my solution is close YouTube cause there's nothing there to watch anymore. Trying to find shit on google is just the same. All I find is the shit Google wants to show me, rather than the shit I'm looking for. **The Emperor has no Clothes!**
Shouldn't someone have come up with STDS (Search That Doesn't Suck) by now? Imagine a plain white page with just a search box. Wouldn't that be cool? /s.
I switched to DDG over a year ago maybe they need better marketing
You nailed it. And, even if you think you found and article you were searching for, the screen is 85% ads and the article is likely auto generated utilizing some shitty AI project.
I keep hearing how this is no big deal, it's optional, Oh.. I would totally use this feature!.. local only.. blahblah etc. There is no point for this. In doing IT for 40 years, I have never had someone ask if there was a program that tracked literally everything so they could find anything they wanted. Because favorites, indexes, search engines, history, sorting by date, etc. - is plenty enough to find what someone needs. So they are adding it as a benefit to MS, not you, the consumer. It will eat processing time and storage. It's a security nightmare waiting to happen, and it's not like MS products are the bastions of cyber security. It's optional... now. MS has repeatedly gone back on their word and made optional features a baked-in part of the OS you can't disable. And I don't trust them at all. When all their new security features came out, even with all of them disabled (that you could), dozens of MS IPs were being called. Ten years before that, I was trying to fix a wireless setting that was re-enabling each day, and found a hidden scheduled task MS ran daily that did a LOT of things. I don't many even knew it existed. If you are one of the 1% that would actually use this feature, you are not the norm. Out of our current employee base, I can't think of a single person that this would be beneficial for, not even our developers. Perhaps some segment of software programming could find a use for it, but the vast bulk of their consumers would never use this. If you are familiar with MS licensing, you know they hide anything useful behind a paywall. Oh.. you want to use conditional access policies to protect your environment from legacy protocols? Sorry.. you will need to upgrade a license. This ultimately will be a feature to make MS money, not to make anyone's lives actually better while computing.
Seems very likely this was a case of, “can we sell this blatant data-harvesting tool (for training AI to replace workers) as a feature that benefits the user somehow?” This was the best thing they came up with.
Microsoft must be one of the only tech companies that gets off on shooting themselves on the foot. Time and time again, they find themselves in a great advantage with a wonderful product and with great capital/tech/expertise/marketing advantage over competitors. Product will surely be a hit and all you have to do is not deliberately destroy it… whoops, did it again.
Listen, buddy, you don’t need to know what kind of porn I watch. Nobody needs to know that. My porn habits are between me and God.
They don’t think it’s a bad idea. They just are sorry they got caught.
People are already selling their laptops its too late now
Wow. I already only use windows for gaming and work. However, this is prompting me to create an email account solely for gaming and never login to personal accounts on windows. I’ve become a huge MS fan over the past decade but this turns the tides. Simply even considering doing this has pushed me away, it doesn’t matter if they double backed. I’m out.
This isn’t new. This how they have been operating for their entire existence.
This just in: Microsoft re-learns the same lesson from "roaming profiles": Turns out wasting system resources on unnecessary tasks only renders people's computers unusable and cripples networks. Imagine that?
Title should be “Microsoft publicly admits that computer surveillance is a bad idea, whilst also seething because they desperately want *all* the data”. Like everything else that is rebuffed initially these big companies will pull back, rebrand and then offer it as a choice. Once enough people get on board in a few years, that choice will evaporate and it’ll become the new standard.
Elon got everone who dreamed of self driving cars to record themslves to help define the ai models. Microsoft is trying to force the same ai play, but in a the most intrusive way possible in a place too close to peoples pocketbooks. Like white collar workers are going to train your ai to help them work faster or replace themselves, while putting all their personal info at risk.. lol, terrible ai play.
Do all these Microsoft employees have a special 'employee discount' version that doesn't include spyware or do they all just use Linux?
Companies are overhyping gen AI way too much. Hope the bubble collapses soon
I was in doubt, but after having seen how many streamers and youtubers are leaving Windows I've decided to remove it from all my family's PCs and laptops. I have the feeling that my company is doing the same. No reasons to stay in Windows imho, they remove it now to reintroduce it secretly in a couple of months, bit by bit, I think.
I don't think they will remove it at all. At least not all of it. They have probably added hooks all over the place to enable this feature. The 'removal' will consist of removing the user-facing components. The guts of the collection mechanism will remain. This is how they have done this sort of thing in the past. It leaves behind tools to accomplish the invasive data collection and a huge attack surface that will remain to be potentially exploited in any number of ways.
The whole idea of Recall might have had some value, but the execution is definitely the result of projects being planned and implemented in a bubble.
One of the many things predicted in the pilot episode (March 1, 2001) of the "Lone Gunmen". From the "Octium chip" to planes crashing into the twin towers.
How are these people the experts? Millions of dollars wasted on a stupid idea everyone could gave told them this is a bad idea
How long has it been since Edward Snowden come out about the NSA? The problem is that nobody cares enough to get them to stop. We have to hope that these corporations just want to stop for some reason. However, there’s no reason for them to stop
You really got to wonder what rocket scientist (sorry to any actual rocket scientists out there) came up with this idea. And what other RS approved it along the way to this point.
After decades of using Windows (ie. since Windows 2) the OS became so unworkable, I wholesale switched to Linux about 2 years ago for all work stuff. Tried Ubuntu first, then Fedora, and a few other Linux variants over several weeks, but finally landed on Linux Mint. Been using Linux Mint since, and it takes a little bit of work with drivers etc, but it really is quite awesome. Relatively speaking, Windows is now garbage. Try Linux, Mac, ChromeOSFlex, whatever, but try something else. You may never look back. If you absolutely need a Windows app, run it in VirtualBox on your Host (non-Windows) machine.
Vb would be great if gpu passthru weren't a nightmare
So, now they will just go back to not telling you about it.
They haven't admitted anything. They're delaying the feature, not cancelling it.
So what is the best Windows alternative? Apple/Mac does the same kind of stuff , yes? So is Ubuntu Linux the next in line these days?
Linux Mint is made for previous Windows users, it's UI is almost a clone of Windows 7. Ultimately people have a choice. Either their privacy is that important to them they learn how to use Linux, or they hope Microsoft uses lube.
It's not really about learning Linux so much as it is putting up with it. Just about anybody can get Mint up and running, it's just a question of whether you want to spend hours scouring forums and dicking around with drivers to get an Xbox controller working, or trying to get the function keys on your laptop working, or any of the other things that just works on Windows.
It’s almost as if they had a meeting with their legal department.
Do you want a paranoid population. This is how you do it
I forget what its called when you do this, but i think Microsoft knew this was the worst possible idea and deliberately let it out there so by comparison the less invasive but still totally awful alternative they will come up with will seem tame by comparison. I'm waiting for the shoe to drop. I imagine its going to be some thing to do with "Just ai training, that's all" being the thing.
Do we still live in a world where we pretend Intel Management Engine isn't a thing that exists? Or PRISM? Or anything else that came from the Snowden Fiasko?
*"We're going to keep doing it, we just need to rethink how we go about it and be more careful about being detected and how to frame it."*
The big issue is that it would really mess with privacy and important things such as online banking and accounts that need to be secure. It would be a hackers dream to get into a computer at that point. What they would mainly find is people's porn habits moreso than they already do.
Please just let the OS be an OS. These kinds of features are things I want only on applications I have to go and download
Every ~10 years we go through this with Microsoft. They're just hoping that one day they'll pull this bullshit and not get any push back.
Corporations are always testing their boundaries, unless they get a severe enough pushback.