Microsoft’s recall AI tools bring unwelcome returns

Security and privacy advocates protect themselves for another difficult fight For recallAI tools deployed in Windows 11 screenshots, indexes and stores everything the user does every 3 seconds.

when A recall has been introduced In May 2024, security practitioners rounded up to create gold mines for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they could even get short administrative access to Windows devices. Privacy advocates warned that the recall is ripe for abuse in intimate partner violent environments. They also said there was nothing to recall storing sensitive, lost content sent through privacy protection messengers such as signals.

Total recall

After months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended the recall. Thursday, company I said It was a recall of a reintroduction. Currently, only insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version are available. Over time, this feature will become more widely available. A Microsoft official wrote:

Recall (Preview)* Save time by providing a whole new way to safely search what you saw and did on your PC. Copilot+ PCS AI features allow you to quickly find and return any app, website, image or document, simply by describing your content. To use the recall, you must opt-in to save the snapshot, an image of the activity, and register with Windows Hello to check its presence, allowing you to access the snapshot. You always control which snapshots are stored and you can pause the saved snapshots at any time. Using Copilot+ PC throughout the day to work on documents and presentations, make video calls, and tackle context switching across activities, recalls employ regular snapshots, helping you find things faster and easier. If you need to find or go back what you’ve done before, open a recall and authenticate with Windows Hello. Once you find what you’re looking for, you can resume your application, website, or document, or use a click to act on the image or text of the snapshot you find.

Microsoft hopes that the ability to suspend concessions and recalls that require opt-in will help quell the collective uprising that occurred last year. That’s probably not for a variety of reasons.

First, even if User A never chooses to recall, he still can’t control user B’s machine settings from Z to Z. This means that User A is screenshot, processed with optical character recognition and Copilot AI, and stored in an indexed database on another user’s device. It would indiscriminately hoover User A’s sensitive material of any kind, such as photos, passwords, medical conditions, encrypted videos and messages. As Privacy Guide Author em I wrote it on Mastodon:

Unfortunately, this feature extracts information from the secure software used and stores it on this person’s computer in a less secure way.

Of course, this person can take all this screenshots manually anyway, but with this feature, even intentional people may not notice it is turned on or accidentally assume it is safe enough.

This feature hasn’t been released in full yet, but it may be soon.

The existence of an easily searchable database that captures the awakening moment of a machine is also a jackpot for others who don’t have the greatest interest of the user. That level of detailed archival material is undoubtedly subject to subpoena from lawyers and government. Threat actors who have been able to install spyware on their devices will no longer need to scrutinize it for the most sensitive data stored there. Instead, they mine recalls just like running a browser database that stores passwords.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a message asking why the feature would reintroduce the recall within a year after it got such a chilly reception. For critics, recalls may remain one of the most harmful examples enshittificationRecently coined term for shoes with unnecessary AI and other features to existing products, if there are some negligible benefits to users.

This story originally appeared Ars Technica.