New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC
Recall uses AI features "to take images of your active screen every few seconds."
This is just a fucking privacy nightmare. We like to laugh and play here about Linux quite a bit, but holy shit this is the actual "If you're using Windows and expect privacy at all, this is it, you should throw that notion out the window."
I don't care how much encryption there is, or the assurance that it's only on your hard drive, I've sat in too many corporate meetings in my career to trust that. There is no way Microsoft is just letting you have that data and they're not reporting it out. Very least? They're using ML on it to aggregate what it sees in the screenshot, and then saving that. Worst case, they're saving it to an encrypted blob storage, calling that encrypted, and hiding deep in the ToS that you actually agreed to that (even though it said in the big letters it was local only, sorry woopsie in the small letters it said it's also stored there.)
Fuck, ignoring the obvious pron implications that I assume everyone here is immediately thinking of, think of HIPAA, think of the private communications with therapists that people have, think of all of the financial documents you've opened, think about bank accounts, chats, fucking everything.
Worst case, they're saving it to an encrypted blob storage, calling that encrypted, and hiding deep in the ToS that you actually agreed to that
And then it's discovered that bucket was accidentally set to public for over 8 months. Oopsie daisy! But you can't sue us because also deep in the ToS was a forced arbitration clause.
Also, if you don't agree to the whole ToS, you can't use the computer you just paid for.
But they specifically said in their blog post that it has "privacy you can trust." Just imagine all the trust you have in Microsoft plus all the trust you have in the accuracy of AI and rest easy. Plus the AI runs locally so they can trust you to pay the power bill.
Don't think about how much money they could make with their business customers, based on telemetry alone.
Yeah at this point you must assume that they are mining that data one way or another. Paying for windows license has no meaning practically speaking. And yet we pay and they mine...
I am so glad I switched to Linux 7 years ago. What an absolute shitshow Windows OS has become
Yeah having made the switch a while back and really happy about it. Mega corps are deff tightening the screws and this is just the start.
At this rate any self respecting adult will need to learn Linux lol
Every other month microshit creates a batch of Linux enjoyers.
We like to laugh and play here about Linux quite a bit
We do? Aside from the "I use Arch, btw" memes, I must not have got that memo :) And, uhh...I use Arch, btw.
Fuck, ignoring the obvious pron implications that I assume everyone here is immediately thinking of, think of HIPAA, think of the private communications with therapists that people have, think of all of the financial documents you’ve opened, think about bank accounts, chats, fucking everything.
So much this. I'm glad I dumped Windows and this just guarantees that I'll never return.
Meanwhile in the EU
Europe sets benchmark for rest of the world with landmark AI laws
""With the AI Act, Europe emphasizes the importance of trust, transparency and accountability when dealing with new technologies while at the same time ensuring this fast-changing technology can flourish and boost European innovation," he said.
The AI Act imposes strict transparency obligations on high-risk AI systems while such requirements for general-purpose AI models will be lighter.
It restricts governments' use of real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces to cases of certain crimes, prevention of terrorist attacks and searches for people suspected of the most serious crimes."
<snip>
if you’re using windows and expect any privacy at all […] throw that notion out the window
Correct. And the same is true even if you are using linux, macOS, android, or a butterfly to manipulate bits to send a message through the internet.
Because if your message ends up on the screen of a windows user, it’s also going to be eaten by AI.
And forget the notion of “anything you post on the internet is forever”, this is also true for private and encrypted comms now. At least as long as they can be decrypted by your recipient, if they use windows.
You want privacy and use linux? Well, that’s no longer enough. You now also need to make sure that none of your communications include a (current or future) windows user as they get spyware by default in their system.
Well maybe not quite by default, yet
I'll legitimately be moving to Linux today. This just broke the camel's back for me.
One of us.
If you are new to Linux I would recommend buying a second drive or dual-booting for a bit just to ease into it. It has helped me persist with the transition because I always have the option of booting into Windows for a few hours if there's something that I'm just too tired/frustrated to deal with at that given moment. Over time I've found myself booting into Windows less and less, to the extent that I'll be able to drop it completely later this year without the big learning curve/wave of troubleshooting that I encountered the first time I tried to switch cold turkey.
I can second this! For me it meant that I could finish my game of modded fallout new vegas, and connect to my work's microsoft vpn nonsense (IT support didn't fancy trying it on Mint but that's another story!)
I now have a personal OS that I like, and a windows partition for those few things that I can't be bothered to troubleshoot.
So far the list is just those things and the Unity Engine as Visual Studio debugs better than code in my experience. :)
Having the option to flick back is great :) In the XP days, I loved the WUBI(?) tool that let you install ubuntu dual boot as an exe, but I think that's not a thing these days., :)
@Ilandar this is a good solution . Another would be to just not jump ship head first, but rather replace everything wth FOSS alternatives instead if they're not available on Linux (e.g.: replace MS Office with LibreOffice, Photoshop with GIMP or something else, etc.) and use them for a while. Most of the programs should also be available for Windows, and if not you could also use WSL to run them.
Once you get used to these programs, the actual Linux transition should be easier.
Awesome! There are so many good communities on Lemmy for Linux noobs and enthusiasts! Be patient, and take snapshots!
@Onii-Chan @UngodlyAudrey I suggest starting with Mint Linux and see how it goes. Or Kubuntu.
As others said, trial and error, and patience. My two cents, as a Windows convert who likes to game, I did PopOS. If you have an nvidia card they have a version with the drivers baked in. Steam was relatively easy, there were only a few things I had to go to the terminal for. Now it's my daily driver and I actually just uninstalled Windows a few months ago.
Your comment inspired me and I just finished moving over. So thx.
Congrats, I'd recommend Linux mint. Feel free to DM me/reply to this comment if you have any questions
I suggest EndavourOS, fedora kde spin or Nobara
I'm curious whether the increasingly invasive telemetry of modern Windows will have legal implications surrounding patient privacy here in the US. I work IT in the healthcare field, and one of our key missions is HIPAA compliance. What, then, will be the impact if Microsoft starts storing more and more in-depth data offsite? Will keyboard entries into our EHR be tracked and stored in Microsoft's servers? Will we subsequently be held liable if a breach at Microsoft causes this information to leak, or if Microsoft just straight-up starts selling it to advertisers? Windows is our one-and-only option for endpoint devices, so it's not like we can just switch.
I genuinely don't have the answers to these questions right now, but it may start to become a serious conversation for our department in the future if things continue at the trajectory they're going at. Or, maybe I'm just old and paranoid and everything will be okie dokie.
I guess it will be like it was before, that there is a different version of windows for these use cases. Like Windows LTSC.
Like most of Microsoft's more odious features, this one can be turned off through GPO/Intune policy across an organization. As such, the liability will mostly fall on the organization to make sure it's off. The privacy and security impacts will be felt by individuals and small businesses.
They claim that the data is only stored locally, so far. We'll see, I guess.
Sadly a lot of the privacy switches are exclusive to enterprise and education users, but our endpoints are running Pro (we have our previous supervisor to thank for that). I guess I'll hope this is one of the ones we can just toggle off without any fuss.
That closing quote is ominous:
"Recall is currently in preview status," Microsoft says on its website. "During this phase, we will collect customer feedback, develop more controls for enterprise customers to manage and govern Recall data, and improve the overall experience for users."
I read "so, yeah, we built in all the telemetry connections we swear we'll never use ... just for testing, ya know?"
more controls for enterprise customers to manage and govern Recall data
ahh ok so this is employee monitoring software
Probably more what MangoKangoroo and B0rax talked about, that enterprises can opt out of this telemetry, due to compliance or Intellectual Property protection.
So only the commoners get mandatory full-scale surveillance, Ehm I mean "ai enhancement"
Despite the privacy concerns, Microsoft says that the Recall index remains local and private on-device, encrypted in a way that is linked to a particular user's account.
Just like how Microsoft domain-bound emails were stored locally on machines running Outlook, right? Or how purchasing and downloading music, movies, and video games meant that we owned them, right?
I don’t believe for a fucking second that this “feature” will remain locally encrypted forever. Fuck Microsoft, fuck the AI bubble.
“Don’t be evil!
…
wait, you say you’ll pay me to be evil? Well fuck that changes everything!”
I have to believe at this point that a serious generation gap exists if there is an audience for this sort of constant monitoring. Because that's what it is.
Where it goes and whether Microsoft can be trusted are of course very valid concerns, but Jesus tap-dancing Christ, this is surveillance before the data go anywhere. Add that to your AI assistant that works best with the camera on, et voila!
No doubt Google is going to say "hold my beer," and there's no pure Linux offramp on the overwhelming majority of Android hardware, so even if you've told Microsoft to fuck off ...
I would say the vast majority of people (across all generations) either don't know, or don't really understand how extensive it (the monitoring) is and what the consequences of that are.
Just look at the number of normies who use Apple, Samsung, or vanilla Pixels as their daily driver. Unless you have a degoogled Android, all the major flagship devices are essentially surveillance and advertising powerhouses. People have embraced the willful ignorance part of this bargain. They think they need whatever proprietary garbage is offered by Apple, to the point that even their own privacy is too ethereal a concept to regret mortgaging it away in the tradeoff.
As you might imagine, all this snapshot recording comes at a hardware penalty. To use Recall, users will need to purchase one of the new "Copilot Plus PCs" powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, which include the necessary neural processing unit (NPU). There are also minimum storage requirements for running Recall, with a minimum of 256GB of hard drive space and 50GB of available space. The default allocation for Recall on a 256GB device is 25GB, which can store approximately three months of snapshots. Users can adjust the allocation in their PC settings, with old snapshots being deleted once the allocated storage is full.
Oh no my computer doesn't meet the hardware requirements whatever shall I do
Mine doesn't meet 1 req for win 11, I refuse to go into the bios and turn it on
"Recall screenshots are only linked to a specific user profile and Recall does not share them with other users, make them available for Microsoft to view, or use them for targeting advertisements. Screenshots are only available to the person whose profile was used to sign in to the device," Microsoft says.
It's conspicuous that this statement talks only about the raw screenshots, not any data derived from them (such as aggregated data, inferred data, or even just slightly reprocessed data). So Microsoft could do any minor reworking of the data and send it off to the cloud for their own purposes, while technically complying with the above.
How does this work with local laws regarding 2 party recording? If you're on a video call and this records the other party without their permission, that is AFAIU illegal in many states in the US. I'm sure in parts of Europe as well.
on your PC
*on Microsofts PC.
Our PC
A lawsuit waiting to happen... someone needs to class action MS for systemic breaches of privacy. Think of all the critical infrastructure, government, medical, policing, etc. systems processing sensitive, private, and in some cases classified, information.
I open windows and it starts recording: opens Plex, plays Mash for 13 hours straight, PC closed down.
Good news , it is just on their Copilot+ computers for now. For now is likely doing some heavy lifting there, though.
I threw Mint on a partition to test moving away from Windows, and sadly does not play well with my 2080ti. This makes me want to put more effort into getting it to work...
I honestly switched to PopOS, which has an NVidia version with the driver baked in, and it was stable as a rock. ended up just being easier for me. (Much better as a gaming OS all around tbh)
That was the next thing i was going to try. Already have the bootable preview on a drive even. Maybe I'll try that first before diving in to the wild west that is getting nvidia to work.
try $ sudo apt install akmod-nvidia. it's gonna pull in some dependencies and a proprietary driver, and probably break Secure Boot if you have it set up, but that's how i got it to work on Fedora (except i used dnf, of course)
Awesome, thanks for the tip! Hopefully makes less of a headache for me tomorrow
There's a lot of work going into nvidia on linux ATM, so its improving pretty fast, but Also you can get a faster amd GPU with the money you can get from selling your 2080 ti
NOPE!
You cannot pay me to use Windows 11.
Wish I had a choice, at work. Technically I can run Linux or MacOS, but I'd need to run a Windows VM for a few things anyway.
I mean, no thanks.
But they did this already, right? Their "Timeline" feature in Windows 10 recorded a log of your activities to display it in your Win+Tab menu screen. I switched it off immediately, but the point is this is a new approach to an old feature they have done in the past.
Everybody must have turned it off, though, because it hadn't been present in Win 11 until now. It's still a dumb idea.
Well, so, you use password generator, the password screenshot is saved.
This makes most password generators useless because they show the password for user feedback. You can turn this MS AI off, but I will have no idea if there was a bug.
In light of the recent forays by AI projects/products into the reason of coding assistants, from copilot to Devin, this reads to me as a sign that they've finally accepted that you can't make an ai assistant that provides actual value from an LLM purely trained on text.
This is Microsoft copying Google's captcha homework. We trained their OCR for gBooks, we trained their image recognition on traffic lights and buses and so signs.
Now we get to train their ai assistant on how to click around a windows OS.
yep! I didn't pick up on any explicit link ... but the coupling AI and recall is not coincidence. It's serfdom.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC.
To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research.
By performing a Recall action, users can access a snapshot from a specific time period, providing context for the event or moment they are searching for.
For example, someone with access to your Windows account could potentially use Recall to see everything you've been doing recently on your PC, which might extend beyond the embarrassing implications of pornography viewing and actually threaten the lives of journalists or perceived enemies of the state.
Despite the privacy concerns, Microsoft says that the Recall index remains local and private on-device, encrypted in a way that is linked to a particular user's account.
To use Recall, users will need to purchase one of the new "Copilot Plus PCs" powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, which include the necessary neural processing unit (NPU).
Saved 68% of original text. :::
The spoiler is broken
What could go wrong? /s
Good thing I removed every Windows I had but one where I only game on lol.
What's that got to do with AI?
Edit: Ah. Probably the search bar from the screenshot.
Didn't they do that before with the Windows 10 timeline, which they later axed it off?
