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Abandon Ship!

https://infosec.exchange/@winterknight1337/114906298563785317

here is the referenced article: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/23/microsoft_copilot_vision/

59 comments

  • All MS needs to do is cook their frogs (users) slowly, over years, and MS will be just fine and can add whatever they want. As long as they do it slowly, incrementally. Postponing Recall after the first public backlash was also smart, because the audience tends to forget over time and now it's psychologically not such a big deal anymore already.

    I'm sure users will find some convenient excuse this time as well, maybe "yeah sure it's spyware but at least I can turn it off until the next update", not realizing that Windows in the past had no spyware included at all and that the amount of spyware that you need to turn off and also ensure it's off after each update has grown significantly over the years. In fact I'd even guess that without 3rd party anti-spyware-tools or well-configured group policies it's impossible for the common Windows user to find and plug all the holes which leak data. And even then, future updates might introduce new data leaks or re-open old holes.

    As long as this situation doesn't change, as long as there's no really simple way to turn off everything from one convenient place, this company is just screwing you around. Remember that Microsoft is, at least since Nadella is CEO, not in the "we sell you a decent OS and that's it" business anymore. They're in the data business. They're in the "we sell or gift you a somewhat usable OS with minimum maintenance from our side and in return we get more and more data from you. Also please use our online services so that we get even more data" business. And now they're also in the AI business, which means they want not just more data from you but they want to feed their bots literally everything you're doing, and that is only possible by having constant screen sharing with Microsoft active.

    The biggest problem of all this is that if you want to have a secure or private communication with a Windows user, you'd first need to check whether they don't have this stuff running in the background, because this gets data from all sorts of applications, including any open chat windows, and it also gets input from your microphone. It's like every Windows user will have a Microsoft camera behind them pointed at the screen at all times and one has to hope that this camera isn't actually on. If it is on at any point, it will undermine the security and privacy of any applications the user has open, because it can see and hear everything in clear text/voice. Or in other words: it's becoming increasingly more difficult to ensure that you can still have a private chat (voice or text) with a Windows user...

  • To be fair, this is not Recall, as per the article:

    While the screen snooping only happens when the user expressly activates it as part of a Copilot session, unlike Recall, which is constantly active in the background when enabled, it's also designed to be more proactive than previous releases.

    So... it's Google Lens?

    I don't know, man, people keep telling me about all these Microsoft features and none of them ever show up on my devices. I think technically the next time I reboot my PC on Windows I'll have the black blue screens of death, but I'll believe it when I see it.

    Also relevant:

    At the time of writing, Microsoft was only offering Copilot Vision in the US, with the promise (or threat) that it will be coming to very specifically "non-European countries" soon – a tip of the hat, it seems, to the European Union's AI Act.

    • all these Microsoft features and none of them ever show up on my devices

      Lemmy tells me I have a dozen Windows issues I don't have. I should also uninstall a bunch of crap I don't have.

      Guessing most of the hate is from users with factory installed Windows on their laptops. Good god, the crap they throw on there. When I deployed company laptops it was easier to activate Windows, wipe and install from a vanilla ISO. No problem.

      • I'm sure the features do exist, but there's a big mix of people being semi-disingenuously mad at features you toggle off on install and never think about again, features in preview buids and features that don't quite do what people say they do.

        That's not to say I wouldn't prefer many of those to... you know, not exist, but it's also true that my copilot button does nothing (that's a lie, it brings up the start menu), I don't have Recall, there are no ads in my Start menu and the extent of my interaction with "Click-to-do" was accidentally stumbling upon the shortcut, turning it off and never thinking about it again.

        I shudder to think how much development time Microsoft dumps into things that work that way for all of their tech-savvy users and only exist as gimmicks and adware for normies. It's a dumb, dumb way to make software, but it's much more manageable than some corners of the internet say it is, be it due to the ragebait economy or just how weirdly partisan and irrational the Linux rah-rah gets.

        As a long term dual-booter the whole thing seems kinda dumb to me on all sides for different reasons. I'm mostly just annoyed that I can't get Bazzite to hibernate properly and that I have to keep paying people to make my Windows taskbar float on the side of the screen like KDE does by default. And nobody is fixing either anytime soon because everybody is too busy being rich or smart or whatever other useless thing people like to be on the Internet.

        It's a very stupid century.

59 comments