Windows Recall today: Your data is private and stays on local machine.
Recall after 2 years: We may use your data to train our AI models, improve our services and personalize your experince.
Best part? It’s using your hardware and electricity to train the models.
Interesting way to put it. The first thing it made me think is that if they did the 2nd part entirely within your PC, would it be ok privacy-wise, and would the consumers be ok with it?
I haven’t looked into the current iterations options, but I think I still want the option to turn it off. Personally I’m less concerned with privacy and more concerned with it using up my computers resources.
Even if all the processing remained on my devices, I still wouldn’t want or trust it. Microsoft could change that policy at any time, claim something like my logging in to my local account constituted agreeing to their new terms, and expose screenshots of my password manager in an unsecured public data store.
Fuck Windows Recall, and fuck Microsoft generally for being so fucking awful to their customers but mainly fuck them for forcing me to finally make good on my threat to switch to Linux. I’ve been using Windows for over thirty years and switching off their spyware for ten, but this is the final straw.
Fuck Windows Recall, and fuck Microsoft generally for being so fucking awful to their customers
Always has been.
No, there’s a bigger context that you’re not considering: enterprise IT orgs in privacy-sensitive/confidential domains.
This whole feature is an absolute non-starter in biotech, defense, finance, and a bunch of other industries. It’s an infosec nightmare. Legal teams will categorically refuse to allow W11 to be installed simply due to the legal jeopardy it would put their own orgs in, since it implicitly trusts MS with who the fuck knows how much data exactly.
I continue to be shocked and baffled that MS isn’t taking their stance on this product as an “always-on” thing back to the drawing board.
I consult in some companies that don’t even allow copy/paste in outlook. Like, these are actually MS security policies that can be set.
How in all of the actual fucks could they allow MS to see everything on your screen.
I agree with your non starter assessment.
Yeah I work for a major company in healthcare and they don’t allow Windows 11 for several reasons.
But also outside of the healthcare data issue, there’s the legal issue of retaining data. Our company doesn’t allow us to retain emails for more than 2 years and there are lots of other retention policies, and software to enforce them, that don’t require keeping data, but instead require deleting it. This is a common trend in major corporations right now. You can’t have data hacked or subpoenaed in a court case if it doesn’t exist. Recall is great for micromanagement of employees, but bad for just about all other parts of a company. I don’t get who is behind this and who they think they’re appeasing with it.
Don’t they already have a non copilot version of Windows 11? I believe the OPM is already using it.
Nah. Even if it’s local, I’ll burn my CPU cycles on what I want to, thanks. That’s like installing a bitcoin miner in your PC and claiming, “But it only runs in the background.” Fuck off and buy your own hardware, Microsoft.
Set up a new pc for someone today. Turned off all the OneDrive backup options. Rebooted and copied their files from a USB to SATA adapter. They turned the backup settings back on again!
Can’t trust Microsoft.
They “trust me” dumb fucks
May not have been Gates that said it, but it embodies an attitude which appears prevalent throughout big business.
Edit: O&O Shut Up is a free tool that helps you easily turn off/disable quite a few of the worst “features” on Windows.
I think that was The Zuck.
You would be correct.
Can’t trust Microsoft.
Always has been.
“You can turn it off”, “it’s an optional feature”, they didn’t even last a year! What ever happened to slowly boiling the frog?
The frog is a captive audience
“Slowly” is relative. Also remember that windows 10 was the last windows you would need to ever buy? (To be fair that is more true then Microsoft would like these days)
Switched back to Linux this week and I couldn’t be happier.
Upgraded*
Saw this bullshit coming, already got a linux mint dual boot setup on my work pc.
PSA: If you have a bigger usb formatted to the ntfs file system, consider switching it to exfat file system when working with linux. I had a hard freeze up and couldn’t get my files off for a bit, and this what I suspect was the issue.
What version of Linux did you go with?
Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon
Keep in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean that recall itself is actually doing recall stuff or even running a process (I haven’t checked if it does but not necessarily) like it would on a copilot laptop.
It is however very stupid that you can’t uninstall recall without messing up the file Explorer. My guess is that it’s a bug or some weird dependency needed with explorer.exe that handles the file explorer and a bunch of other stuff like the desktop and taskbar. It could also be spying but this seems like a stupidly obvious way to do it if they wanted too.
Even on Pro or Enterprise editions? I can’t imagine businesses tolerating this never mind governments.
Did not show up on my work laptop running Win 11.
Didn’t show up on my win11 pro desktop pc.
This is why win10 in a vm
I’ve been running Pop!_OS with the Cinnamon desktop environment on my machine at home for the past 3 months. I’m very impressed with the out-of-the-box experience. All my games run in Steam or Lutris.
Fuck Microsoft.
BOGU!
Why do people still use that legacy proprietary malware-ridden morally obsolete operating system?
Why do you think they do? Logically think it through.
Market sharen and incumbent advantage. Ease of adoption (or appearance of). Ubiquity and lack of need to retain. Predatory behaviour by MS. Different priorities for users.
Unless you actually consider the real reasons why Windows is so widespread you’ll never make a dent in it.
Ease of adoption (or appearance of)
Thank you for acknowledging that point. Because since Win7 or so, Almost all major Linux distributions are shitloads easier to learn that any windows environment, no matter how unfamiliar you are with Linux. Basically, all major desktop environments behave like an optimized WinXP desktop.
What’s not user friendly about learning multiple different settings panels? /S
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It came with the machine.
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There are a few things that still don’t quite work as good in Linux.
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For me personally, VR is the last thing holding me back. Hopefully that changes soon though. My laptop has already been Windows-free for a while.
let me be the one to say: the only people who “need” VR are those earning their money with selling VR products. No one else in the whole wide world actually needs VR.
Yeah. But this person spent money on it so they want their devices to run it. I don’t get your point.
There’s a lot of stuff everyone has that they don’t need. What’s your point? Are you going to go vegan? because technically you don’t need meat. Are you going to stop driving an automatic transmission? Because you don’t need that. Oh, social media (Lemmy included), you definitely don’t need that.
I’m getting a gaming PC soon because I want to use VR and while I do want to primarily use Linux, I will be keeping a Windows install for it.
A gaming PC is also not something that anyone needs, but I want to own one and I want to play VR games on it. Your point is not as good as you think.
So how good did I think my point was? VR is an artificial hype, especially in a time where almost all major game releases lack in story and already put way too much money into graphical effects. It’s a gadget.
No one needs a computer at all. We all know that already.
Normies doesn’t care. Instead they watch brainrot content on TikTok
(and most don’t have desktops or laptops to start with)
On Windows? You sure about that?
Oh no! Anyways…
