“Microsoft Recall”. How many of you have heard about this new feature from Microsoft? Recently, Microsoft announced this feature during its Surface event. However, this has been one of the most controversial features since its announcement. Due to some reason, Microsoft has decided to delay the Recall feature for another few months.
What is Microsoft Recall?
First of all, the Microsoft Recall feature is mainly designed for its Copilot+ PCs. You can think of Copilot+ PCs as PCs with AI features built-in. One of the AI features of these PCs is Recall. Using the Recall feature, you can find all your previously viewed content by doing some keyword search on your screen. Similar to Google Photos, where you can search for your memories by typing keywords, using the Recall feature you can find all the contents with just your own keywords.
For example, there could be a document and also photos regarding “Goat Cheese Pizza”. The moment you search for this keyword, Recall will automatically locate it using AI.
How Microsoft Recall Works?
How the Recall feature works is, when you are viewing content on your browser, your Copilot+ PC will automatically capture the snapshot periodically. Since the Recall has already saved a snapshot of the contents, it can use it to perform machine learning to recognize certain keywords from your search.
You can even scroll across time to find the topic you are looking for across any of your applications. It even has object recognition, which means you can find your photos and memories as well. According to Microsoft, the Recall feature leverages your personal semantic index, built and stored entirely on your device. Whatever snapshot it takes belongs to yours and locally stays on your PC.
If you feel at one point, you want to pause your Recall feature, you can click on the pause button right from the System Tray on your Taskbar. Well, that is when the Recall feature becomes controversial.
Why has Recall become a controversial feature?
I am sure by now you might already have an idea how does Recall works right? Well, the main reason it became controversial due to the privacy issue. A few days after Microsoft announces Recall, security experts and researchers have dig in deeper into this feature and they found it makes the user vulnerable.
According to Kevin Beaumont, the Recall features, stores all the information in the SQLite database as a plain text. This means the data is not encrypted at all. Even a hacker who can hack into your computer can view your recent searches on Recall or even all of your snapshots. Isn’t this scary?
Apart from that, the database are stored locally on your computer under the AppData folder. Which any user can access this folder easily. On the other end, when Microsoft talks about Recall in the Surface event, they mention that the attacker needs to get physical access to the user’s computer to grab the screenshots. But Kevin Beaumont proved them using the InfoStealer trojan, the attacker can easily get access into the user’s computer remotely.
Is Microsoft Recall coming this fall?
After taking such a hit on user privacy, Microsoft has said that it will make the Recall feature opt-in. This means if you opt out you won’t be able to use the Recall feature. Currently, they are testing Recall further before the launch this fall which is around September.
This news was even confirmed by Samsung as well. In a recent blog post by Samsung, it mentions that its laptops will not be getting access to the Recall feature until this fall or later.
In conclusion, I think the Recall is a cool feature. If Microsoft can fix the issues mentioned above, then surely Recall will be a great feature for Microsoft. The only problem is, that you need to have Copilot+ Pc’s supported to use the Recall feature. For more interesting tech updates, do follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
