Another great reason to switch to Linux. Fuck this shit
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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What I don't understand, is what I would need and use it for? Never in my life I thought "damn if only I had a screen recording of everything I did 1 week, 1 month or 1 year ago". Like I don't get the use case, ignoring anything else. There is no use case.
I can view my terminal history and my recently accessed files. I have version control with git where I want and need it.
There is no use case.
So you’ve never wanted to find an article/headline that you vaguely remember seeing? Or a product that you looked at? Or a picture that you looked at?
There absolutely is a use case for full reachability of everything you’ve done on your computer. Git commits and terminal history and “recent” files list don’t even come close to providing the same thing lol
This is just a thinly veiled ad for AdGuard.
If only we could have a response from an independent security researcher instead of a product, that would be great.
The worst thing about it is, even if you switch to Linux for privacy yourself, you'll also need your friends to switch as well, otherwise if you message them on their desktop, they're a liability, as the damn recall will be there too, leaking your data.
It'll be hell for activists.
Funnily enough, Signal has circumvented the issue by marking their chat window as DRM content, making it invisible to Recall.
They used the invasion of privacy to destroy the invasion of privacy?
They didn’t circumvent the issue - they did what Microsoft tell developers to do in regards to their programs and recall lol.
Lol
The same has been true of email for years, but less bad. Activists will need to be even more careful in who they trust.
In what sense?
- if you send plaintext, their email service could spy on them
- once they decrypt, they could accidentally reply with the decryped text, or it could get backed up if they store a copy somewhere
- screen readers could store decrypted email
In general, if you don't trust the receiver, you shouldn't send sensitive information. Windows Recall doesn't change that, if they're competent, Windows Recall won't be enabled.
I think this is more an issue for less technical users instead of activists, because activists will be more careful about who they trust than a secretary or something for a powerful individual.
Of course it is. It's invasive by design. The "recent tweaks" were because of backlash, but now that's died down
I am surprised by how rabid the Recall backlash continues to be compared to similar features elsewhere. Apple's equivalent, in particular, seems to not be a concern to anybody. I don't have anything Apple, so I'm not sure if they ever rolled this out, but they sure announced it to a whole bunch of crickets.
Well:
- MacOS is not malware
- Apple doesn't make a habit of blatantly lying about their security
- As you said, it doesn't actually exist
Ah, so Apple just happens to be one of the good massive megacorps routinely deploying anti-consumer practices. Gotcha.
See, it's that gap in perception I'm interested in. Microsoft wants nothing more than having the closed ecosystem Apple has. From their Surface line to their much maligned store to their subscription-forward, always signed-in account environment.
Why they suck so much at selling that where Apple can get away with murder is much more interesting to me than the perceived differences between the implementations, which I would argue in a number of cases are worked backwards from the brand perception anyway. Part of it is the implementation and the execution rakes Apple chooses not to step on, but certainly not all of it, and that's fascinating.
so Apple just happens to be one of the good massive megacorps
No they're just a different type of shitty.
Right. But the reaction they get to their shittiness is very different, which is the thing I keep wondering about. Everybody keeps telling me why Microsoft is shitty and how Apple isn't shitty in those ways specifically while conceding they are in others.
I want to know why Apple's shitty doesn't make them the poster boy for shittiness but MS's shitty does. And it does. As far back as Windows 95, Windows is the thing you use that you hate to use and love to hate. That takes work and luck. I want to know how you can dig that hole so effectively while your competition can be just as overtly crappy and still come across as sleek and all the way above good and evil. There's a fundamental truth about branding and squishy human brains buried in that phenomenon.
I want to know why Apple's shitty doesn't make them the poster boy for shittiness but MS's shitty does
It doesn't. They're both shitty.
See, we disagree. You and I agree they're both shitty. The rest of this social network does not, and the larger world ABSOLUTELY does not.
I'd argue once you get into normie land entirely maybe MS starts losing some of the stink, too, but for a lot of that middle space the perception is absolutely not the same, which is why this thread exists in the first place.
M$ is trying to take an open system and forcibly close it - after driving their user base by force into an unstable OS
Apple were smart enough to start locking their shit down before home computers became an absolute necessity ...and do it with a functional OS
Apple locked down their shit way after home computers were a necessity. I'd argue it was the rollout of handheld devices that needed a home computer to fully work that made their walled garden viable.
And Windows is the main player in home computer OSs. You can take issue with their choices, but it's certainly functional. I'd argue Win11 is annoying, but not even in the top 3 least functional versions of Windows. I mean, I was there for Me, 8.0 and Vista.
But yes, Apple successfully deployed a locked-down, closed space, and I'm curious about why people are ok with it. That they did it early is... a solid hypothesis, I suppose.
Nah, that shit started to creep in with the imacs - when system 7 became macos.
Win 11 really isn't functional. There is a serious brain drain problem in microsoft, and as a consequence they've broken some seriously fundamental shit (see: alt tab debacle) made some seriously stupid staff decisions (see: guy responsible for win11 start menu and how it's coded) and somehow even managed to break their own printer spooler.
Vista at least had the woe that it was forced into hardware packages that weren't powerful enough to handle it, win 11 is just a steaming pile of garbage code.
It works, though. And the UX is basically Win10 with a modern big data business coat of paint.
Even if I buy that the brain drain in a company with a staff the size of a mid-tier city can't sort out the tech side, which is debatable, that is still a functional OS.
One can make excuses for Vista, but it had absurd compatibility and performance issues in the hardware it was targetting. 95 and Me were barely stable enough to run software. Windows 8 was a (bad) tablet OS crammed into a desktop environment.
I'm not saying Windows 11 is good, I'm saying the bottom of this particular barrel is in the Mariana trench.
In fairness they’re not the same thing - recall records everything you do making a nice single honeypot of all your actions. Apple’s thing is really just a search bar that can reach into apps like email, calendar, etc - it’s not recording your bank logins. Google Play Services tracks everything you do on Android and sells it to advertisers.
It's a centralized search that can dig through your activity cross-platform and parses it through a centralized AI. Whether the data is stored in a log or as screenshots is a difference, but not as big of a difference as people make it out to be. It just feels intuitively weirder because one is humanly readable and the other one isn't.
To be fair, that's my takeaway from a lot of AI backlash. A whole bunch of it is people finally getting an intuitive grasp on activities that big data has been doing for years or decades and it finally clicking into shock because they can anthropomorphise the inputs and outputs better.
No wonder the techbros have lost their intuititon for what will trigger backlash. In many cases they've been doing far worse than those things with zero awareness or pushback.
Don't worry, Microsoft is bringing semantic search to Windows too. That way you can have the worst of both worlds.
Access controls is the big difference. Apps with sensitive data can choose to hide stuff to a system wid search API. It can do so on an individual level, even. And even if it previously was accessible it can be drumroll recalled. Exposure happens when a search is made.
Microsoft Recall is all or nothing. Once it has been displayed Recall has it and you can't selectively erase stuff. Exposure is immediate. It's just purge the whole database, or leave it all in there. Apps can't retroactively flag stuff.
... But leaving AI summaries on by default was very stupid by Apple
I'd argue that this is way more nuance than the public in general puts into the issue. In fact, the goalposts have moved quite a bit. "The big difference" used to be the local encription of the data, but it became not it once Recall implemented that. Or the opt-in, which went the same way.
That's not to say I don't think it's a better idea to have per-app support (which is incidentally how Microsoft implemented the feature in Windows 8 the first time), but I will say that's not why people are mad at one and not the other.
I don't actually know if you can selectively erase specific screenshots from the database because I, again, can't find any traces of Recall on my supported PCs for the life of me. Coverage had made it seem that they could, since presumably the much criticised side effect of having a local, freely accessible database with just a bunch of pictures is that you could... you know, access those. Did they obscure it further in the reimplementation?
And also, I think people believe I'm being argumentative, but I'm not. Can somebody point me at the Recall opt-in and/or some explanation why my Copilot + device running 24H2 would not seem to have it available anywhere? I'm confused about the rollout here. I don't want it on, but I'd like to try it and see what the practical implementation is for myself (and be double sure I have it turned off once I'm done with that).
After the heavy criticism they changed it from default on to (opt out) to default off (opt in).
In theory you could modify it's database, but they did mention applying stricter security (but what good does that do when the frontdoor access remains via the prompts)
Yeah, and that didn't change the perception people have of it. That's the point I'm making.
And I'll get back to you on how easy it is to specifically remove specific data entries (and whether or not the prompts are handled locally or remotely) if and when I can get a hold of this mythical unicorn, because by how much people ignores my questions I'm assuming nobody here has actually tried it?
Interesting, I hadn't seen news about that Apple feature before... There seems to be a lot more press around Recall, which in turn amps up the amount of consumer attention and backlash.
That said (and I wouldn't want Apple's "semantic search" even if I had an Apple device), I'd still trust Apple more to manage the dataset securely compared to Microsoft. The Apple ecosystem is far more strictly controlled, whereas in Windows it's more of a free-for-all (most people just used XP as an administrator, the UAC could be easily disabled on Windows Vista and 7, etc.). Especially with Microsoft's move to put advertising in Windows 11 and complete lack of security measures in the initial version of Recall, it is very hard to trust Microsoft in this regard.
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Um, the core feature is privacy invasion. It does what it says on the tin.
It's fine if some people want that functionality, as long as it's not enabled by default.
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I've disabled windows update completely so I can pick and manually dl updates. Never going to put that recall shit on my pc.
I've disabled Windows completely so I can be safe and sound. Never going to put that shit on my PC.
-- sorry, it seemed funnier in my head.
How'd you do that? I've made registry tweaks, group policy tweaks, etc and my windows machine still eventually hits a limit where it forces updates around the 12 week mark. Granted it's still longer than before, it isn't completely disabled.
At that point it's easier to install Linux.
I run Linux too, but I have to use windows for some contract jobs.
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