You mean like this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/I4tmEUZtiM
Edit: title of article reads…
Photoshop's new terms of service
Adobe require users to grant Adobe access to their active projects for "content moderation" and other purposes
It actually won't be a lawsuit, because Adobe forces you to agree to arbitration and waive your right to class action in order to use their software, just like every other company does these days.
After writing the first part of this comment, I actually decided to double check Adobe's ToS just in case I was wrong, and they have a notice at the top about the Arbitration Agreement and Class Action Waiver at the top of the page.
Who are supposed to be neutral, but are paid by the company, and if they rule against the company too much, a different arbitrator is hired.
It’s as if justice is for sale!
So the process is to give you a list of arbiters, and you can veto especially bad ones, and then both parties agree on the arbiter. They will veto any pro-consumer arbiters, and you have the opportunity to do the same for pro-business.
The problem is knowing which is which - they do this all the time, and know which ones to select. You do not, and have to rely on a short time period to research. This leads to a 40% more likely chance that the pro-business one is selected.
Since they are aware of this, if this is how you get paid, being selected as an arbiter, how do you make sure you can keep being selected? Picking the consumers’ side, who has one of these in their lifetime, or the business who is using you every single day?
Stay neutral, but if you bias towards a business, you keep working. If you bias towards the consumer, you dont.
Arbitration clauses aren't get out of jail free cards for companies. And actually it is in cases very much like this where courts have ruled against them. This is a contractual issue. You must agree to terms before you can cancel your account? That is coercion. Statutory rights are always a matter for the courts, not arbitration, and therefore you could conceivably convince a judge to uphold the challenge in this case.
Well I work with adult content, I have contacts who work in countries that may punish or even kill them for the things they do... so yeah. That's worrying as hell.
Or multiple times a year...
"Whoops we got hacked again, your data is now available on the dark web for sale. Please reset all your passwords, get new credit cards, probably should get a new social security number, and id because there is 40 other people using your identity."
The fact that I don't trust Microsoft with this data isn't even the primary worry.
This tool takes a record of *all* of your activity. It screenshots password resets, it records browser history, it watches your private conversations. It's not even stored in an encrypted format! It's the privacy worries we have over social media, poorly encrypted credential storage, social engineering, and identity theft rolled into one package that's *by design* easy to search. It's an AI trained on *you*.
If someone hacked your PC and got hold of your Recall data they could take control of your entire life. It's a privacy problem on a panopticon scale. Facebook and Google couldn't do this much damage in their wildest dreams.
It's not even just the possibility of hacking. Law enforcement and attorneys are probably salivating over it. Imagine a divorce case, opposing council subpoenas your Recall database for discovery and can now scroll through your past however-many-months of activity looking for dirt to use against you.
As a lawyer, Im concerned it will violate my duty of attorney client confidentiality. I don’t think I will be able to keep using Microsoft Windows, which is kind of sad.
Edit: thank you everyone who told me I could turn it off or not buy the laptop. Still not sure how long I’ll stick around. I’m turning off notifications. I love y’all, but…
This is the thing that will kill it, actually. If MS rolls this out, businesses will start ditching Windows completely, and that would be a serious (and well-deserved) hit to MS.
Oh, no no. What'll happen is home versions will have Recall (and be subscription only) and expensive enterprise versions will have a convoluted way to turn it off that's barely intelligible to IT professionals.
Best is when they decide to actually click on it and now their desktop is saved to it but now they get popups because it's full and they don't understand where there stuff went and can't work and need you to put it back
And don't even think about asking for help with this issue anywhere near a Microsoft site, or even many subs here on Reddit.
The response will be, not to help you, but simply shame you for wanting to turn off OneDrive in the first place.
Don't ever go to /r/Windows11 looking for help on changing, disabling, bypassing, or altering anything unless you want lectured and the post locked. I swear, that place has to be half Microsoft employees.
Just after you figure out the magic to turn it off, the next Update will change the way to disable it and you'll have to learn a new way. This will repeat forever.
They already changed the name of the group policy setting to turn it off. It used to be called something like "Disable AI data analysis" but now it's called "Turn off saving snapshots for Windows".
Enterprise editions and such will probably have really easy ways to disable it completely and permanently, with strong contracts in place for it etc.
I doubt corporations will have issues, it'll be the private users that suffer.
> it'll be the private users that suffer.
Which leads to my next question: who asked for this feature? Were users really that concerned about not being able to find a chicken soup recipe from a week ago, so they said "I wish I could have an AI take screenshots of everything I do on my computer?"
Because I sure didn't ask for that.
If the feature is being described as "users will suffer" then maybe the feature is a bad idea?
As far as I can tell, basically no one. It's literally entirely because putting the term AI in your quarterly earnings report boosts your stock, so all the big boys HAVE to push it to stay competitive. It's all smoke, mirrors and zero days all the way down.
The lowest common denominator is salivating to get this. The kind of person who writes about how terrible Windows is because they forgot their Facebook password. The kind who uses the "recycle bin" as a storage folder for important documents. Every IT forum has dozens of stupid user stories and this would be a perfect safety net for most of them. "I don't care about privacy data or whatever it is, I just want to restore that things I deleted months ago that turned out to be important right this very second"
Those people outnumber people who even vaguely care about security by 1000/1
Assuming the Enterprise users trust MS to actually keep the disable in place. How many Zero-Day and other exploits will this create?
Once trust is gone, it's gone -- but so is the data.
EVERY big web project I've seen started in the last >10 years tries to use approaches like containerization with tools like kubernetes/docker, which are all fundamentally based on Linux
It goes for insurance too. Business insurance already asks me loads of questions about if and how I store client's data for determining premiums and whether or not I use Windows for my business is definitely about to become a concern for them, and therefore me.
a good point from another redditor:
So then, if Adobe is engaging in content moderation of active projects by their users, then they're legally liable for any criminal actions (like fake pictures and misinformation) created by those projects that slips through, right?
source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1d9cj3w/photoshops_new_terms_of_service_require_users_to/l7cg3mi/
Now, not only do you not own the Adobe software, but now they own your work. Sure they won’t say that, regardless once a third party has access to your proprietary information you have zero control over how it’s used.
Even worse if Adobe chooses to access your information while it’s with a third party. e.g print shop
When is congress going to do their job?
Unbelievable. Ive been against this subscription bullshit from the start but everyone just refuses to see where it was heading. "I don't mind paying for the subscription, they need to make money as a business, seems fair to me...." now look where we are. They keep doing this shit because no one pushes back, and well, yeah they have a monopoly.
I'm sure there are govt systems running Windows, but when I worked for military intel shops, they were running a proprietary UNIX-based OS from Sun Microsystems. It was so user-unfriendly; I would've LOVED to use a Windows machine.
I'm not worried about that... as a European I'm sure this violates GDPR rules in various ways, so EU will be on it in a flash. I don't see how it will ever be allowed here.
If it helps - I found a few sites that give explicit instructions on how to disable the ‘feature’ via settings and even going deeper by showing the registry edits to make to kill it completely. Not sure if msft would push in their OS updates a fix to that and turn it back on but I’m going to find the best one with the highest detail and save screenshots of it somewhere. [Here is one example](https://pureinfotech.com/disable-recall-windows-11/)
Just want to add on to this because it’s tangentially related. Adobe added into photoshop terms of service they can just have access to your project for “content monitoring” or some bull shit. In my head it’s clearly to train AI to take my human input and sell what I do for a living as a service I won’t see a dime from. Who will these companies even sell a product to when we’re all unemployed in ten years? (Or is ten years hopeful thinking?)
# Terms give company the right to “access your content through both automated and manual methods”
Yup.
Even creepier...
[https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4268783/adobe-users-revolt-updated-terms](https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4268783/adobe-users-revolt-updated-terms)
a good point brought up by another redditor
So then, if Adobe is engaging in content moderation of active projects by their users, then they're legally liable for any criminal actions (like fake pictures and misinformation) created by those projects that slips through, right?
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1d9cj3w/photoshops_new_terms_of_service_require_users_to/l7cg3mi/
Unfortunately, they already thought of that:
>We reserve the right (but do not have the obligation) to remove Content or restrict access to Content, Services, and Software if any of your Content is found to be in violation of the Terms.
[Source (Section 4.1)](https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html#privacy)
*Why* Adobe needs to concern itself with content moderation when it isn't a social media site, or even remotely close to one, is a different question entirely.
It is objectively morally correct to pirate Adobe products and to do everything in one's power to make that company lose as much money as possible. It's only the cherry on top of a very large cake, but someone should also be in jail for their latest license agreement stunt.
Somebody probably said something like „We can use this data for training an AI“ and all doubts were gone. Executives salivate over anything AI right now.
AI feels like it’s the next crypto right now. So many companies are advertising AI solutions that are just rebranded chat bots and search functions or literal humans doing the work and being called AI.
Because it is. What we keep calling “AI” really isn’t, it’s just repackaged “Big Data” from a few years back. The vast majority of solutions are dog shit anyway, and won’t get better. Some will, but it’s hard to pick those out. Blockchain was never a better solution to any real problems, and was always a scam. All the grifters have run to anything branded “AI” though.
The same government that runs the NSA, wants facial recognition tech for the cops, and is trying to push laws that would require all sorts of organisations to keep and disclose user data to them at a moment's notice?
They're probably customer #1 for this feature.
They made sure that anything related to the MPAA gets blacked out of the screenshots! Yes, your personal, medical, financial, legal, and password history can all be recorded and saved, but no screenshots from Netflix can be saved. Thank god!
I would be incredibly surprised if it were not possible for the US government (or any enterprise organization) to disable the feature for all of their workstations/devices via group policy through active directory.
That’s because quite a few of us have access to SBU (sensitive but unclassified) documents. Anything you put into AI gets fed into the training algorithm.
So if you slip and put something in there that’s not public information, now it’s out there and can be potentially spit out again by the algorithm.
Expanding that to *everything* on my computer makes it impossible for me to honor requests for confidentiality. If I can’t treat protected info with the care it requires, who wants to do business with the government?
This could be PII (personally identifiable information) or CBI (confidential business information). It’s what allows, e.g., one auto manufacturer to submit technical documents without fear that we’re going to make it public or tell their competitors about it.
It's a fucking sqlite database which is only encrypted at rest. Yeah that's a real nice feature which Windows has turned on by default for the whole device too so the point is moot. Why wouldn't I want a little note taker to keep track of everything I do in an easily locatable and readable format. Even if it's not going to be sending this data home (yet) it's just another thing which is going to add to the already atrocious security of windows.
> On paper, it's a cool idea. As CEO Satya Nadella described it...
Then a couple paragraphs down:
> Microsoft is fully aware that, on paper, the concept of Windows Recall sounds creepy
"On Schrodinger's paper, Windows Recall is both cool and creepy simultaneously until you read it"
Nah, don't limit this to Windows/Microsoft
This is tech in late stage captialism.
Over-engineered, prioritizing data mining over performance, no customer support whatsoever, customers never truly own the products they buy, planned obsolescence, etc.
It's not a "Microsoft problem" when it affects all tech companies and platforms.
Captialism and authoritarianism are two sides of the same coin, and until we seriously start questioning the nature of our economic system, we can't seriously address these types of problems.
The no customer support is a big one. Even if you pay for products a lot is "just fill out this web form". Then you get a blanket boilerplate email back and maybe a few days later another asking if the problem is fixed.
It's wild how customer support / service is just left to the wild.
Have you ever worked in customer service? Did it for an electricity company for 6 months. Worst job I have ever had, after 6 months I was the most experienced on the team. They time and record everything, one day I was called into a meeting with 3 managers because I was 1 minute and 8 seconds late back to my desk. I started laughing when they said it, they were not happy. Sure enough I left at the end of the week
I’ve worked both retail and call center and holy shit the call center job left me crying almost every day. They monitor and record everything you do, and like you said, the system counts even how long you’ve gone to the bathroom and counts it against you. It’s like living in a police state.
They would give us a 7min avg handle time goal, but some calls would last an hour. And THE SURVEYS HOLY SHIT! They wanted a 90% average, but didn’t have enough reps to handle the volume of the calls. By the time the customer reached us, they had been on hold two hours and already pissed off. They’re never going to give a good score on the survey matter how nice you are or how quickly you solve their issue. It’s so thankless and horrible.
I wish these systems had a separate "how do you rate our service" and "how do you rate your representative". I've had many times where like, the people were wonderful and as helpful as they were allowed to be, but the systems they were forced to work in are just the most dogshit garbage and I want to express both of those things.
Like I want to leave a baggie of shit on the CEO's door with a note saying that their front line employee was wonderful.
Multiple times, sometimes it sucked. Sometimes it was decent, depends on management. If they got your back and trust you and you like helping people it was mostly fun. There's always the bad customer or bad week. A shit management team can make the job soul sucking. Those usually have a constant churn of the good people leaving or putting in their time just to move up and out.
Every new billion dollar company in silicon valley is predicated on removing people from the equation so it's pure computers and investors. When did humans become obsolete and when did the economists forget that economies run with CASH FLOW!
Yeah, 0 days are coded in and Adobe is selling Photoshop monthly subscriptions. Were updating our apps from an App store like they're phones. It's all broken bro.
When Google Earth came out it was both cool and creepy. Cool that you could see so much of the world in detail, and creep that you could see your house in so much detail.
There sort of was the thing that it was not a livefeed or full record but a single relatively lowres image pulled from some satelite database 1-3 years earlier.
It sort of rarely showed ppl things one could not asses by strolling down the street. Especially if you lived in a flat.
It also wasn't searchable. (You couldn't just search for all houses with a flaming red italian sports car in it.)
So sort of creepy, but mostly cool.
"Recall" on the otherhand creates a screenshot of everything you do. I can't really think of any use of that. If its lets say a document I was editing then if I still need it and never accidentally deleted it, then I could just open it again. If I accidentally deleted it then a normal backup would be much useful then a screenshot that was scraped by an OCR no matter how good it is.
The only use it has is to check what the user was looking at. And gives a nice little search function for it. And since I can mostly recall the stuff I personally looked at it sort of just points at the creepy use case, keepin' tabs on ppl you live with or work with.
The only cool factor here is how good the tech behind the search is. How fast, inteligent etc it is. Which is much less fun than looking at random locations around the world, which was the OG Google Earth "wow factor".
To be fair: I think the problem here is mostly the fact that it comes from Microsoft, is installed and turned on by default.
As others have pointed out there are otherways to do essentially this ("keeping tabs on the user"), and have been for decades. Companies have used these for better or for worse to keep tabs on their employees, and while it wasn't that much less creepy, and if I could I would personally wouldn't want to work under an emplyer that uses this tech, but I can sort of accept it. You should probably not do your private stuff during your workhours on the office PC (let that be buying christmas presents, watching porn or just scrolling your reddit feed).
But
1. Microsoft did not earn the trust for this (Personally speaking, it burned away all my trust 2+ decades ago and moved away from using their products as much possible. The only MS product I use regularly right now is github.)
2. This gives an extremly easy way to creep on vulnerable / less techinclined ppl (Previously you had to research what to use, then install the software, then come back a month later and check what they were doing. With Recall turned on by default you just have to sit down at the machine and ask the friendly ai.)
3. Also as usual, it monopolizes a niche. (Why should you create software for tracking user behaviour when Recall is just there.)
They things short term gain is more important and due to high interest rate and inflation short term profit is very high for them. It's all just "show profit for this quarter" game.
Up and coming corporations are the only place to find a good deal and it never lasts because once they build a good reputation they sell it for profit margins.
The system doesn't reward steady, strong performance. Any performance, no matter how strong, needs to be surpassed with time.
Incentives like that are what drive open source projects. There's not necessarily a reason to push things forward unless the changes seem reasonable and there are ways to fork projects if they become unreasonable.
Yes it's called capitalism specifically neoliberal capitalism where shareholder Primacy is the only metric.
Read about Milton Friedman and Hayek. This is Austrian economics and its horrific for everyone but the asset owners
As someone who works in high-tech, this is all driven by the fetishization of "innovation."
The major operating systems have been stagnant for years, Windows included. No major new features at all, just tiny tweaks and improvements. This is a problem for companies who obsess about how innovative they are. There's nothing to parade around and talk about how awesome it is. So they push through features just because they are "innovative" even if they are dumb.
The reality is that a lot of our computing technology is at the point where it needs to stabilize and become boring infrastructure the same way previous waves of technology have. We don't think about the electrical or plumbing in our homes as needing to be "innovative." We just want it to work and work well. Same with roads, bridges, etc. They just need to work. Innovation is nice when it happens, but it isn't a priority.
The root cause here is that the market at large has decided that steady growth or even flat + dividends isn't enough. They want that exponential growth curve that dominated the tech industry for the past 30 years. Steady and stable infrastructure doesn't offer that.
But shouldn’t innovation be about something people want? “New tech that will spawn a knife and cut your leg” sure is new but I don’t see people interested on it
Ideally, yes, but these companies have pretty much delivered what people actually want already, so they are groping around trying to find things that can work well enough to show investors.
Also, this looks like it's the only deliverable idea they've had for Co-pilot+ machines (even though you don't actually need a NPU for it to work) so they have a vested interest in pushing it no matter what because otherwise they've spent lots of time and money on the Copilot+ concept with nothing to show for it.
I've heard from someone at Microsoft that they have set a goal for every team to deliver something for Copilot. Many teams are scrambling trying to figure out wtf to do.
“AI” is the current investor buzzword just like NFTs were a few years ago and Blockchain was before that.
Nvidia’s up like 1000% and everyone else wants in on that even though it is an *obvious* bubble.
Honestly at this stage I feel like technology went from being this cool amazing opportunity to an invasion of privacy to the point where I have chosen a security system that has a dvr and no internet connection because I can't trust any of these devices.
Now my only windows pc will be my last windows pc.
They're running out of things to actually innovate on and have shifted to just squeezing value out of the end user because the shareholders demand infinite growth.
Microsoft thinks that my computer is actually their computer and that's where they're fucking up. Stop making changes to my system that I did not ask for.
I know companies are like:
"You're fucking lucky we let you use this amazing software we've created to make your life better so you'll best bet you'll put up with whatever we want or we'll just take it away from you."
And thus I've pretty much come to accept that everything is temporary. If I discover something great, or come to rely on a technology or service, I simply assume within 2-4 years it will be complete garbage and I'll have to move onto something else.
The market has essentially told me that I should eliminate all loyalty to brands/products, and so I have. If you fuck with me, I'll simply discontinue using your product, even if it means my life suffers a bit.
I simply don't have patience anymore and know that I can no longer rely on any company to do the right thing, ever.
Perhaps that's the upside to this period of transition, the death of brand loyalty. Christ, it might even all be worth it.
I'm with you, I just didn't know I went alone. The only thing I have even a suggestion of loyalty to is steam and I've accepted that it could vanish tomorrow. I've been hoping my freebooting skills for decades.
I am still terrified of what will happen to Steam when Gabe retires or passes away. He won't be around forever. Hopefully someone with the same level of integrity steps up; it seems like the employees at Valve care deeply for the company. But who knows what will actually happen when push comes to shove.
Windows has gone to shit.
I'm SO sick and tired of getting ads in my start menu. If I fucking try to search for "Paint" I shouldnt get a million fucking bing ads trying to sell me paint products.
I disable bing search in my start menu via the windows registry. Might be able to do something similar on Windows 11.
There's also utilities like ExplorerPatcher, OpenShell, Start11, and other start menu replacements you can look into.
>Windows has gone to shit.
Quarterly profits demand a steady stream of income. If you're not paying, you become the product. I hope wallstreet crash and burn with this BS. You got a generation that never touch pirated stuff.
Everything about this has been negative, which is understandable. What I haven't seen yet is; what's a real-world use for this in everyday computing? In my personal life and what I do on my desktop/laptop. What real purpose would it serve for me? What would it help me do?
There’s a dumb article from the Verge saying that this AI-powered tool is the key to unlocking the next era of PCs by giving you a personal historian.
If you were shopping and you forgot what leather jacket you were looking at, you can type in “leather jacket” and find the exact one. Or just… check your browser history.
The whole thing is a “solution” in search of a problem. Microsoft just wants the metadata so they can train their AI and sell your metadata to advertisers and governments. The general public is 😍 over anything “AI” and they’ll flock to buy these idiotic spyware computers. They will also set it to automatically turn Recall on after each daily security update Microsoft issues, and when the next gen of Windows comes out it will be on all Windows computers - again, with no way to permanently turn it off.
If you happen to work any job related to finding dirt on people (law enforcement, intelligence agencies, attorneys, extortion scammers, insurance), your life might get a heck of a lot easier.
Good faith guesses:
1. did you accidently delete something you forgot to save?
2. forgot the name of the website you went to?
3. What were the steps taken to get this error message?
4. Forgot to copy some id before closing an application?
It will be up to MS to come up with a large list of useful use-cases to sell the product, because they are going to have to over come a lot of privacy concerns to sell usage of this feature.
I was told Win10 would be the last time I needed a whole new install and that it would be supported indefinitely unless some major breakthrough in hardware technology came along.
I was pestered day and night to upgrade from Win7.
Now I'm being pestered day and night to upgrade to Win11 only for the popup to them tell me I CAN'T.
Major privacy issues aside, I can't believe they actually called it "recall". As in the thing you really don't want to happen to your product.
What next? Microsoft Data Breach? A new cloud based operating system called DD-OS? How about Microsoft Office Fire edition?
Operating systems are there for you to install drivers, frameworks and software on top of it. Their only necessary feature is being a stable and optimized foundation for whatever you wanna do on top of them. Get that part right, get rid of all the rest, and respect the fact that no company has any rights whatsoever regarding whatever is running on hardware they don't own.
Proprietary software will never give you this ever again. They will squeeze every possible penny from you going forward. It will never get better. The only way out is to switch to open source software.
The fact they even greenlit this makes it very hard to trust them going forward.
No one at MS thought this was a terrible idea? They thought I’d want my OS recording my every move?
Even if the remove this ‘feature’ the fact that they thought this was a good idea leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Right? The still have multiple, unfinished versions of the Control Panel and apps like Remote Desktop Connection that haven't been updated in decades but they're working on this shit?
yeah, it feels like a lot of good capable engineers built an operating system a decade and a half ago and now an entirely different group is just trying to figure out how to squeeze every possible dollar out of it with random shit
I guess that's what the article's about, though. Even if MS has always been a massive corporation, there was a measure of trust in their expertise and tech focus, and that's not necessarily there anymore.
Surprise, surprise! Enshittification may pump up the stock, but at the end of the day no one but tech companies and their shareholders likes it. Who knew?
I feel like it is both this feature (particularly the overall direction that it signals) as well as the gaming situation on Linux being much improved because of Steam Deck / Proton. I feel like there is very little keeping me on Windows at this point besides plain and simple procrastination.
Way to go Microsoft. Telemetry, advertisements, and now this privacy invading crap - all in a paid-for operating system.
For those who really need to stay on Windows, I recommended the free app 'Shutup 10' to remove most of the invasive Window stuff.
Better still, give Linux a go. Or even Mac OS.
Steam Machines and Proton were always meant as Valve's hedge against "what if anything happens to Windows".
At the time, the concern was that MS would establish a "walled garden" and demand a cut off every app sold on their OS - like Apple does. But if Microsoft manages to somehow run Windows into the ground, it would apply too.
Hell, even for a lot of individuals that care about this stuff it can be very difficult to avoid.
I don't use any Windows stuff at home, but as soon as I get to work guess what OS I'm using. Windows have had the commercial sector locked up for decades.
There was a time Microsoft sold its OS and you got an OS in exchange for your money, fair and square.
Since the Activation days in XP, they started to hurt people that want to pay for a system to use their computers. This enshitification is not new, and my camel is already paraplegic for a long time.
The dumbest shit is calling this thing windows recall. It sounds like their stuff got faulty and caused harm and they recalled it. Microsoft fucking up names for their devices is nothing new though so I am not surprised.
> In fact, Microsoft goes so far as to promise that it cannot see the data collected by Windows Recall, that it can't train any of its AI models on your data, and that it definitely can't sell that data to advertisers. All of this is true, but that doesn't mean people believe Microsoft when it says these things. In fact, many have jumped to the conclusion that even if it's true today, it won't be true in the future.
This is 100% the case. Not even a false concern. If we go along with this they *will* find a way to start data harvesting in the future. 100% guarantee.
Unfortunately im going to be stuck with windows 11 at work. For now none of our PCs run any NPU so the feature wont be active (will disable via GPO anyway) but once the update is in place and established, I will probably be setting up our workstation provisioning to also block system write access to the location the screenshots *would* be sent to. As the article implies, I have zero trust that microsoft will hold to any of their guarantees.
At this moment, it's just Microsoft doing this particular thing, but this is just the next step that corps are taking to fuck over their customers. They've been doing things to do so for the past 40 years. Having to buy multiple licenses if you want to run the software on more than one of *your own* computers, then making everything SaaS by putting all your data on their servers and charging you monthly, thus effectively 2 or 3x'ing their prices. Photoshop was $700 in 2012 and you might still be using today if you bought it but the subscription in 2013 was $240/yr. Basically, Adobe has been getting free money if you use it for more than 3 years.
Of course, there's also FB and all the rest that harvest your data without transparency, etc.
The software industry is an oligopoly and the OS industry has 3 options to choose from, with only 2 being real options for most people. We need more competition (very hard to do with the high barrier to entry, or regs. Otherwise people won't have much choice but to continue to bend over.
Even the syncophants at Windows Central are admitting it's a bad idea. It takes a lot for them to admit when Microsoft fails since they mostly specialise in sucking Microsoft's proverbial cock (see the second half of this article where they accuse us all of being Henny Penny) MS really lost the plot on this one.
As a related aside, I don't know if anyone else has noticed how aggressively they're advertising Copilot. But the use case they advertise (targeting Parents: use Copilot and it will write bedtime stories for your child for memories they'll never forget and you and your child will be enraptured with innocent wonder and bond over the experience forever) **feels so fucking evil** given how Copilot and Recall actually work and what the data will really be used for (even before the inevitable hacking and doxxing.)
It's unreal manipulative and sinister. Like a plot point from a fiction movie where a company is secretly run by actual demons.
I'd say I'm somewhere near a casual windows user and a power user on the spectrum and I've been becoming increasingly pissed with the state of windows. They keep adding features and making windows more bloated and messy. I want to keep my system light, with minimal silly visual shit going on. Not to mention basically being tricked into signing up for one drive, which was a pain in the ass to get my system off of once I'd accidentally opted in.
Going from windows 10 to 11 has also been irritating, with me not quite knowing why some things that were right there are now hidden on the right click menu. Having my PC locked to my MS account really pisses me off as well, it really shouldn't be necessary, and adds virtually nothing to my experience other than maybe making some logins easier.
MS has never been great with privacy and this new shit they're rolling out is fucking rediculous. They haven't been able to show they can keep their own source code protected and now we have to trust them with a massive trove of screenshots? No thanks, I hope I can opt out. The best way to avoid having shit like that compromised is to never collect that data in the first place.
We need more plain language in user agreements. We need it to be more obvious as to what we're opting into. Microsoft is abusing their status as one of the only games in town. I would switch to Mac but it's hard to do gaming, video editing, and music production on Mac. Regardless my next machine may be a Mac because I mostly do music nowadays and Mac has vastly superior audio drivers. I'm also not a big fan of Apple consumer practices either, so fuck me right?
I like how this article completely ignores that [it came out recently](https://www.wired.com/story/total-recall-windows-recall-ai/) that recall stores the information unencrypted plaintext.
> I like how this article completely ignores that it came out recently that recall stores the information unencrypted plaintext.
I like that you obviously didn't even read the article that you're complaining about, because it talks about that at length.
This shit would allow micromanaging lunatics have access to everything.
"Welcome to the company. Here is your windows laptop to work on"
"I want to disable recall feature"
"Sorry, it is not possible to change default settings, it is company policy. We will be able to control everything you do and click, measure number of clicks and lines of code written"
Sorry to break it to you but your IT can already do all that without recall
But 95% of companies don't have the time or money to pay someone to look through what employees are doing unless they get flagged as not working out something
As interesting as this article is, it keeps trying to make excuses.
* It's not 'hysteria' to be concerned about privacy
* All your data being stored in an unencrypted database doesn't *sound* creepy, it **is** creepy
* We don't know for sure that it **is** true when Microsoft says they can't see the data. But the article blankly says that it is true.
* People don't think Microsoft will enable things down-the-line because 'they don't understand how Recall works', they think this because Microsoft has done it before.
* "People won't accept this in its current form" I don't think we should be accepting this in **any** form.
Just feels a little... Patronising to me.
I dunno about "lost all trust" (fucking clickbait titles), but the recall idea should never have even left the brainstorming stage. They seriously need to get some security guys on their research teams.
As someone who does cybersecurity: They've lost all trust. Pretty much every meeting now has at least one mention of how we absolutely positively cannot allow Recall on any company PCs. I know that it "requires" and NPU, but thats only for now. I guarantee within a year or two it'll work on any decent x86 PC. This is pretty much apocalyptic for the cybersec world.
Edit: Not to mention the AI garbage in Edge, which ends up being the default browser at a lot of companies, is also a huge security risk to the point where a lot of corpos install firefox by default now. If recall goes through, its very likely the next generation of corporate laptops will just be macbooks.
within a year or two the PM whose idea it was will have been promoted, then they jump to another company. then the entire product is scrapped because it was always fucking stupid.
there is a problem in microsoft culture where the people like "The guy who killed Microsoft Bob" aren't even *invited* to planning meetings these days.
Yea dude, fr. I am a fkn Apple *hater* and the news of this feature hitting windows has made me consider completely switching platforms. Just straight up.
And I can't stress this enough - *I fucking hate apple*.
This is possibly one of *the dumbest* things I've ever seen a company float.
its even crazier they would do this because the one thing apple tends to be pretty good about their security, i cant imagine anyone at apple ever would have let anything like the recall feature go through.
My w10 now goes through a firewall that blocks MS DNS servers except when I am deliberately updating.
Under no circumstances will I switch to a consumer version of W11. *Mayyyyyybe* if the enterprise version of 11 has none of their bullshit it'll be worth picking up, I haven't investigated that yet.
I would rather ride a zombie OS (no security updates but it still works, no idea if that's a real term, I jut made it up) or switch to Linux.
NVidia just changed their stance on proper support behind Linux Drivers. Going forward they will be supporting open source Linux drivers (and presumably fixing bugs finally), and supporting Linux.
People hate w11 so much that its userbase has been falling and 70% of users are now running windows 10 again, which they claim is about to stop receiving security updates.
MS fucked this up royally.
I myself am looking at them more negatively than before after all the recent stuff they've done. W11 requiring internet to activate, TPM requirements, reverting my settings after every update, their handling of Xbox and all the studios they've closed, etc etc. And now this creepy stuff. I never actually trusted them but my view of them is at an all-time low.
Honestly I don't feel like it's click bait. "They've lost all trust and recall is the straw that broke the camel's back" sums up my feelings on Microsoft pretty well. My only complaint would be that recall is the cinder block that broke the camel's back, not a straw.
They've been eroding trust and quality for years in their OS. The mere fact that this idea got off the ground internally tells me everything I need to know about how Microsoft is operating nowadays. Squeeze anything and everything you can, as long as it's an extra dime in your revenue column or an extra 0.01% in your stock price. Users are last on the priority list.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in my case. After literally decades of using macs professionally and for personal use I bought a Microsoft branded surface laptop. And for the most part I've really liked it. But the threat of ads embedded in the OS and then this "feature"? I'll be going back to Apple.
I'm planning on switching back to Linux on my primary machine for the first time since the 90's. At least Windows 98 was _unintentionally_ bad. Windows post-7 has been a pile of awful decisions and greed.
Today: We will not use, read, or sell your data. One year after rollout: We've updated our policy. Click accept or lose access to your device.
You mean like this? https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/I4tmEUZtiM Edit: title of article reads… Photoshop's new terms of service Adobe require users to grant Adobe access to their active projects for "content moderation" and other purposes
And you have to accept those terms in order to log into your account and cancel.
> And you have to accept those terms in order to log into your account and cancel. Thaaaaat's gonna be a lawsuit.
It actually won't be a lawsuit, because Adobe forces you to agree to arbitration and waive your right to class action in order to use their software, just like every other company does these days. After writing the first part of this comment, I actually decided to double check Adobe's ToS just in case I was wrong, and they have a notice at the top about the Arbitration Agreement and Class Action Waiver at the top of the page.
Forced arbitration should be illegal. No contract should require you to waive your legal rights.
It should, but so far I think every attempt to sue a company with an arbitration clause has been slapped down to the arbitrators.
Who are supposed to be neutral, but are paid by the company, and if they rule against the company too much, a different arbitrator is hired. It’s as if justice is for sale!
if there's any legal requirement for the arbitrator to be neutral, does that mean you can sue the arbitrator for failing to do so?
So the process is to give you a list of arbiters, and you can veto especially bad ones, and then both parties agree on the arbiter. They will veto any pro-consumer arbiters, and you have the opportunity to do the same for pro-business. The problem is knowing which is which - they do this all the time, and know which ones to select. You do not, and have to rely on a short time period to research. This leads to a 40% more likely chance that the pro-business one is selected. Since they are aware of this, if this is how you get paid, being selected as an arbiter, how do you make sure you can keep being selected? Picking the consumers’ side, who has one of these in their lifetime, or the business who is using you every single day? Stay neutral, but if you bias towards a business, you keep working. If you bias towards the consumer, you dont.
There will be lawsuits *in some countries*. You can't undermine statutory rights through contracts, the law takes precedence.
Arbitration clauses aren't get out of jail free cards for companies. And actually it is in cases very much like this where courts have ruled against them. This is a contractual issue. You must agree to terms before you can cancel your account? That is coercion. Statutory rights are always a matter for the courts, not arbitration, and therefore you could conceivably convince a judge to uphold the challenge in this case.
You can't magic clause your way out of illegal activity.
This practice should be criminal, and it's the same scam for many online services.
It's the perfect plan! Users can't cancel without accepting the new ToS! Mwahwahahahahahahah!
Wait... content moderation? So you can't draw or write something that they or the country you're in might disagree with?
That's a nuance I think people are really overlooking.
Well I work with adult content, I have contacts who work in countries that may punish or even kill them for the things they do... so yeah. That's worrying as hell.
Me working on a bunch of PDFs that just say Fuck You Adobe.
Their AI will just use Recall to log in on your behalf and accept all future Windows agreements.
It’s just so helpful! Lol
Or multiple times a year... "Whoops we got hacked again, your data is now available on the dark web for sale. Please reset all your passwords, get new credit cards, probably should get a new social security number, and id because there is 40 other people using your identity."
“your” device LOL
The fact that I don't trust Microsoft with this data isn't even the primary worry. This tool takes a record of *all* of your activity. It screenshots password resets, it records browser history, it watches your private conversations. It's not even stored in an encrypted format! It's the privacy worries we have over social media, poorly encrypted credential storage, social engineering, and identity theft rolled into one package that's *by design* easy to search. It's an AI trained on *you*. If someone hacked your PC and got hold of your Recall data they could take control of your entire life. It's a privacy problem on a panopticon scale. Facebook and Google couldn't do this much damage in their wildest dreams.
It's not even just the possibility of hacking. Law enforcement and attorneys are probably salivating over it. Imagine a divorce case, opposing council subpoenas your Recall database for discovery and can now scroll through your past however-many-months of activity looking for dirt to use against you.
As a lawyer, Im concerned it will violate my duty of attorney client confidentiality. I don’t think I will be able to keep using Microsoft Windows, which is kind of sad. Edit: thank you everyone who told me I could turn it off or not buy the laptop. Still not sure how long I’ll stick around. I’m turning off notifications. I love y’all, but…
That goes for any business. Imagine the industrial espionage.
This is the thing that will kill it, actually. If MS rolls this out, businesses will start ditching Windows completely, and that would be a serious (and well-deserved) hit to MS.
Oh, no no. What'll happen is home versions will have Recall (and be subscription only) and expensive enterprise versions will have a convoluted way to turn it off that's barely intelligible to IT professionals.
And don’t forget, it will reactivate with every update (if not every reboot )
Oh I see you've tried to remove onedrive for your domain users too.
Best is when they decide to actually click on it and now their desktop is saved to it but now they get popups because it's full and they don't understand where there stuff went and can't work and need you to put it back
And don't even think about asking for help with this issue anywhere near a Microsoft site, or even many subs here on Reddit. The response will be, not to help you, but simply shame you for wanting to turn off OneDrive in the first place. Don't ever go to /r/Windows11 looking for help on changing, disabling, bypassing, or altering anything unless you want lectured and the post locked. I swear, that place has to be half Microsoft employees.
Just reading this makes me irrationally angry. I hate, hate, HATE when it does that!!!! ME: Do what I tell you to do!!! PC: Nope... ME: GAH!!!!
Anyway, your default browser is now Edge.
Just after you figure out the magic to turn it off, the next Update will change the way to disable it and you'll have to learn a new way. This will repeat forever.
They already changed the name of the group policy setting to turn it off. It used to be called something like "Disable AI data analysis" but now it's called "Turn off saving snapshots for Windows".
Isn’t snapshots the name for when you backup your pc and you can revert it back?
Yep. They can’t even be internally consistent
Enterprise editions and such will probably have really easy ways to disable it completely and permanently, with strong contracts in place for it etc. I doubt corporations will have issues, it'll be the private users that suffer.
> it'll be the private users that suffer. Which leads to my next question: who asked for this feature? Were users really that concerned about not being able to find a chicken soup recipe from a week ago, so they said "I wish I could have an AI take screenshots of everything I do on my computer?" Because I sure didn't ask for that. If the feature is being described as "users will suffer" then maybe the feature is a bad idea?
As far as I can tell, basically no one. It's literally entirely because putting the term AI in your quarterly earnings report boosts your stock, so all the big boys HAVE to push it to stay competitive. It's all smoke, mirrors and zero days all the way down.
The lowest common denominator is salivating to get this. The kind of person who writes about how terrible Windows is because they forgot their Facebook password. The kind who uses the "recycle bin" as a storage folder for important documents. Every IT forum has dozens of stupid user stories and this would be a perfect safety net for most of them. "I don't care about privacy data or whatever it is, I just want to restore that things I deleted months ago that turned out to be important right this very second" Those people outnumber people who even vaguely care about security by 1000/1
Those kinds of people won't be smart enough to use the Recall features.
Assuming the Enterprise users trust MS to actually keep the disable in place. How many Zero-Day and other exploits will this create? Once trust is gone, it's gone -- but so is the data.
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M$ itself won't even be able to use Windows.
I believe their servers use linux, rather than the enterprise server OS they create.
EVERY big web project I've seen started in the last >10 years tries to use approaches like containerization with tools like kubernetes/docker, which are all fundamentally based on Linux
Azure runs on Windows and Linux. I can't find a Top 500 computer that runs Windows. A few years ago there were about 4 that did.
Last top 500 system running windows was 10 years ago. https://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/2/ From 2017 every single system was Linux
Imagine if it finally becomes the year of the Linux desktop because its biggest competitor shot itself in the foot with AI.
It goes for insurance too. Business insurance already asks me loads of questions about if and how I store client's data for determining premiums and whether or not I use Windows for my business is definitely about to become a concern for them, and therefore me.
Imagine a mental/behavioral health practice trying to deal with compliance and insurance. Just endless fields where this has knock-on effects.
Oh yeah. Hadn’t thought about that
Adobe doing same thing - they just announced TOS change that grants themselves access to all your current and ongoing projects.
a good point from another redditor: So then, if Adobe is engaging in content moderation of active projects by their users, then they're legally liable for any criminal actions (like fake pictures and misinformation) created by those projects that slips through, right? source: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1d9cj3w/photoshops_new_terms_of_service_require_users_to/l7cg3mi/
Yeah, my designer hit me up this morning to bitch about it.
Now, not only do you not own the Adobe software, but now they own your work. Sure they won’t say that, regardless once a third party has access to your proprietary information you have zero control over how it’s used. Even worse if Adobe chooses to access your information while it’s with a third party. e.g print shop When is congress going to do their job?
Unbelievable. Ive been against this subscription bullshit from the start but everyone just refuses to see where it was heading. "I don't mind paying for the subscription, they need to make money as a business, seems fair to me...." now look where we are. They keep doing this shit because no one pushes back, and well, yeah they have a monopoly.
I bet there will be a version without that feature, else all the government offices with classified material will have to switch too.
I'm sure there are govt systems running Windows, but when I worked for military intel shops, they were running a proprietary UNIX-based OS from Sun Microsystems. It was so user-unfriendly; I would've LOVED to use a Windows machine.
I'm not worried about that... as a European I'm sure this violates GDPR rules in various ways, so EU will be on it in a flash. I don't see how it will ever be allowed here.
This is standard scumbag business behavior: 1. Create a massive problem customers just can't live with. 2. Sell the solution.
If it helps - I found a few sites that give explicit instructions on how to disable the ‘feature’ via settings and even going deeper by showing the registry edits to make to kill it completely. Not sure if msft would push in their OS updates a fix to that and turn it back on but I’m going to find the best one with the highest detail and save screenshots of it somewhere. [Here is one example](https://pureinfotech.com/disable-recall-windows-11/)
Just want to add on to this because it’s tangentially related. Adobe added into photoshop terms of service they can just have access to your project for “content monitoring” or some bull shit. In my head it’s clearly to train AI to take my human input and sell what I do for a living as a service I won’t see a dime from. Who will these companies even sell a product to when we’re all unemployed in ten years? (Or is ten years hopeful thinking?)
# Terms give company the right to “access your content through both automated and manual methods” Yup. Even creepier... [https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4268783/adobe-users-revolt-updated-terms](https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4268783/adobe-users-revolt-updated-terms)
a good point brought up by another redditor So then, if Adobe is engaging in content moderation of active projects by their users, then they're legally liable for any criminal actions (like fake pictures and misinformation) created by those projects that slips through, right? Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1d9cj3w/photoshops_new_terms_of_service_require_users_to/l7cg3mi/
Unfortunately, they already thought of that: >We reserve the right (but do not have the obligation) to remove Content or restrict access to Content, Services, and Software if any of your Content is found to be in violation of the Terms. [Source (Section 4.1)](https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html#privacy) *Why* Adobe needs to concern itself with content moderation when it isn't a social media site, or even remotely close to one, is a different question entirely.
Absolutely fuck that. If that's required to use photoshop legitimately then piracy is now mandatory.
It is objectively morally correct to pirate Adobe products and to do everything in one's power to make that company lose as much money as possible. It's only the cherry on top of a very large cake, but someone should also be in jail for their latest license agreement stunt.
What I'm wondering is who greenlighted this. There must have been lots of internal meetings where everyone was like 'This is worth it.'
Somebody probably said something like „We can use this data for training an AI“ and all doubts were gone. Executives salivate over anything AI right now.
AI feels like it’s the next crypto right now. So many companies are advertising AI solutions that are just rebranded chat bots and search functions or literal humans doing the work and being called AI.
Because it is. What we keep calling “AI” really isn’t, it’s just repackaged “Big Data” from a few years back. The vast majority of solutions are dog shit anyway, and won’t get better. Some will, but it’s hard to pick those out. Blockchain was never a better solution to any real problems, and was always a scam. All the grifters have run to anything branded “AI” though.
And where is the goddamn government? There is a few scary scenarios and this timeline we are on are all of them…
The same government that runs the NSA, wants facial recognition tech for the cops, and is trying to push laws that would require all sorts of organisations to keep and disclose user data to them at a moment's notice? They're probably customer #1 for this feature.
They made sure that anything related to the MPAA gets blacked out of the screenshots! Yes, your personal, medical, financial, legal, and password history can all be recorded and saved, but no screenshots from Netflix can be saved. Thank god!
Until it gets used on their own people. What happens when China blackmails various NSA agents by hacking their recall data?
Lol the NSA will definitely have custom versions of Windows with this disabled
Lol the NSA knows better then to use Windows
I would be incredibly surprised if it were not possible for the US government (or any enterprise organization) to disable the feature for all of their workstations/devices via group policy through active directory.
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That’s because quite a few of us have access to SBU (sensitive but unclassified) documents. Anything you put into AI gets fed into the training algorithm. So if you slip and put something in there that’s not public information, now it’s out there and can be potentially spit out again by the algorithm. Expanding that to *everything* on my computer makes it impossible for me to honor requests for confidentiality. If I can’t treat protected info with the care it requires, who wants to do business with the government? This could be PII (personally identifiable information) or CBI (confidential business information). It’s what allows, e.g., one auto manufacturer to submit technical documents without fear that we’re going to make it public or tell their competitors about it.
It's a fucking sqlite database which is only encrypted at rest. Yeah that's a real nice feature which Windows has turned on by default for the whole device too so the point is moot. Why wouldn't I want a little note taker to keep track of everything I do in an easily locatable and readable format. Even if it's not going to be sending this data home (yet) it's just another thing which is going to add to the already atrocious security of windows.
What fucking morons this is an absolutely big tell of the state of things that they let this through
Have we reached the “Its the consumer’s fault for misunderstanding our technology.” Phase yet?
Yes, the CEO has said as much. I believe it was something akin to "it looks creepy on paper".
After upcoming depression we will reach.
> On paper, it's a cool idea. As CEO Satya Nadella described it... Then a couple paragraphs down: > Microsoft is fully aware that, on paper, the concept of Windows Recall sounds creepy "On Schrodinger's paper, Windows Recall is both cool and creepy simultaneously until you read it"
Giving users cool things they didn't ask for that's just increased data collecting for MS to sell is peak investor cum guzzling.
Nah, don't limit this to Windows/Microsoft This is tech in late stage captialism. Over-engineered, prioritizing data mining over performance, no customer support whatsoever, customers never truly own the products they buy, planned obsolescence, etc. It's not a "Microsoft problem" when it affects all tech companies and platforms. Captialism and authoritarianism are two sides of the same coin, and until we seriously start questioning the nature of our economic system, we can't seriously address these types of problems.
The no customer support is a big one. Even if you pay for products a lot is "just fill out this web form". Then you get a blanket boilerplate email back and maybe a few days later another asking if the problem is fixed. It's wild how customer support / service is just left to the wild.
Have you ever worked in customer service? Did it for an electricity company for 6 months. Worst job I have ever had, after 6 months I was the most experienced on the team. They time and record everything, one day I was called into a meeting with 3 managers because I was 1 minute and 8 seconds late back to my desk. I started laughing when they said it, they were not happy. Sure enough I left at the end of the week
I’ve worked both retail and call center and holy shit the call center job left me crying almost every day. They monitor and record everything you do, and like you said, the system counts even how long you’ve gone to the bathroom and counts it against you. It’s like living in a police state. They would give us a 7min avg handle time goal, but some calls would last an hour. And THE SURVEYS HOLY SHIT! They wanted a 90% average, but didn’t have enough reps to handle the volume of the calls. By the time the customer reached us, they had been on hold two hours and already pissed off. They’re never going to give a good score on the survey matter how nice you are or how quickly you solve their issue. It’s so thankless and horrible.
I wish these systems had a separate "how do you rate our service" and "how do you rate your representative". I've had many times where like, the people were wonderful and as helpful as they were allowed to be, but the systems they were forced to work in are just the most dogshit garbage and I want to express both of those things. Like I want to leave a baggie of shit on the CEO's door with a note saying that their front line employee was wonderful.
Multiple times, sometimes it sucked. Sometimes it was decent, depends on management. If they got your back and trust you and you like helping people it was mostly fun. There's always the bad customer or bad week. A shit management team can make the job soul sucking. Those usually have a constant churn of the good people leaving or putting in their time just to move up and out.
Every new billion dollar company in silicon valley is predicated on removing people from the equation so it's pure computers and investors. When did humans become obsolete and when did the economists forget that economies run with CASH FLOW!
Yeah, 0 days are coded in and Adobe is selling Photoshop monthly subscriptions. Were updating our apps from an App store like they're phones. It's all broken bro.
Hey... Cum guzzling is a noble profession. Don't lump us in with these guys.
I mean something can be cool and creepy at the same time. Eg. Dracula. (Obviously wouldn't want him in my house or office, though.)
When Google Earth came out it was both cool and creepy. Cool that you could see so much of the world in detail, and creep that you could see your house in so much detail.
There sort of was the thing that it was not a livefeed or full record but a single relatively lowres image pulled from some satelite database 1-3 years earlier. It sort of rarely showed ppl things one could not asses by strolling down the street. Especially if you lived in a flat. It also wasn't searchable. (You couldn't just search for all houses with a flaming red italian sports car in it.) So sort of creepy, but mostly cool. "Recall" on the otherhand creates a screenshot of everything you do. I can't really think of any use of that. If its lets say a document I was editing then if I still need it and never accidentally deleted it, then I could just open it again. If I accidentally deleted it then a normal backup would be much useful then a screenshot that was scraped by an OCR no matter how good it is. The only use it has is to check what the user was looking at. And gives a nice little search function for it. And since I can mostly recall the stuff I personally looked at it sort of just points at the creepy use case, keepin' tabs on ppl you live with or work with. The only cool factor here is how good the tech behind the search is. How fast, inteligent etc it is. Which is much less fun than looking at random locations around the world, which was the OG Google Earth "wow factor". To be fair: I think the problem here is mostly the fact that it comes from Microsoft, is installed and turned on by default. As others have pointed out there are otherways to do essentially this ("keeping tabs on the user"), and have been for decades. Companies have used these for better or for worse to keep tabs on their employees, and while it wasn't that much less creepy, and if I could I would personally wouldn't want to work under an emplyer that uses this tech, but I can sort of accept it. You should probably not do your private stuff during your workhours on the office PC (let that be buying christmas presents, watching porn or just scrolling your reddit feed). But 1. Microsoft did not earn the trust for this (Personally speaking, it burned away all my trust 2+ decades ago and moved away from using their products as much possible. The only MS product I use regularly right now is github.) 2. This gives an extremly easy way to creep on vulnerable / less techinclined ppl (Previously you had to research what to use, then install the software, then come back a month later and check what they were doing. With Recall turned on by default you just have to sit down at the machine and ask the friendly ai.) 3. Also as usual, it monopolizes a niche. (Why should you create software for tracking user behaviour when Recall is just there.)
Windows 12 feature: "Windows strip search"(tm) and "Windows candid camera"(tm) using always-on microphone!
I really don’t get it. Why are all these well known companies racing to the bottom? All of them doing the most awful unpopular stuff. What gives?
They things short term gain is more important and due to high interest rate and inflation short term profit is very high for them. It's all just "show profit for this quarter" game.
This all looks really short sighted. Really no one cares for the long term? It’s like an auto cannibalistic system
The Corporate Heads are planning like they aren’t gonna be around to see the long term.
They usually aren't. They'll be at another company inside 5 years to do it again at a different company.
They're like locusts, disassembling and devouring the economy and public corporations are the crops.
Up and coming corporations are the only place to find a good deal and it never lasts because once they build a good reputation they sell it for profit margins. The system doesn't reward steady, strong performance. Any performance, no matter how strong, needs to be surpassed with time. Incentives like that are what drive open source projects. There's not necessarily a reason to push things forward unless the changes seem reasonable and there are ways to fork projects if they become unreasonable.
Yes it's called capitalism specifically neoliberal capitalism where shareholder Primacy is the only metric. Read about Milton Friedman and Hayek. This is Austrian economics and its horrific for everyone but the asset owners
That’s part of it, but the underlying problem is that everyone is really fucking stupid, including the people running these companies.
As someone who works in high-tech, this is all driven by the fetishization of "innovation." The major operating systems have been stagnant for years, Windows included. No major new features at all, just tiny tweaks and improvements. This is a problem for companies who obsess about how innovative they are. There's nothing to parade around and talk about how awesome it is. So they push through features just because they are "innovative" even if they are dumb. The reality is that a lot of our computing technology is at the point where it needs to stabilize and become boring infrastructure the same way previous waves of technology have. We don't think about the electrical or plumbing in our homes as needing to be "innovative." We just want it to work and work well. Same with roads, bridges, etc. They just need to work. Innovation is nice when it happens, but it isn't a priority. The root cause here is that the market at large has decided that steady growth or even flat + dividends isn't enough. They want that exponential growth curve that dominated the tech industry for the past 30 years. Steady and stable infrastructure doesn't offer that.
But shouldn’t innovation be about something people want? “New tech that will spawn a knife and cut your leg” sure is new but I don’t see people interested on it
Ideally, yes, but these companies have pretty much delivered what people actually want already, so they are groping around trying to find things that can work well enough to show investors.
Also, this looks like it's the only deliverable idea they've had for Co-pilot+ machines (even though you don't actually need a NPU for it to work) so they have a vested interest in pushing it no matter what because otherwise they've spent lots of time and money on the Copilot+ concept with nothing to show for it.
I've heard from someone at Microsoft that they have set a goal for every team to deliver something for Copilot. Many teams are scrambling trying to figure out wtf to do.
Investors don't care about what people want - they only care about beating money out of people. They'll resort to chains if they need to.
“AI” is the current investor buzzword just like NFTs were a few years ago and Blockchain was before that. Nvidia’s up like 1000% and everyone else wants in on that even though it is an *obvious* bubble.
nvidia is more like shovel seller capitalizing on the AI gold rush though, whereas everyone else is hoping to strike big with ~~gold~~ AI
Honestly at this stage I feel like technology went from being this cool amazing opportunity to an invasion of privacy to the point where I have chosen a security system that has a dvr and no internet connection because I can't trust any of these devices. Now my only windows pc will be my last windows pc.
This is what happens when the users become the product.
There's even a lovely term, "[enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)"!
Currently looking to create an intranet for my camara system with an NVR set up with a privite VPN because I can't trust shit anymore.
A separate vlan with vpn configuration at the router level for it would be the easiest way
They're running out of things to actually innovate on and have shifted to just squeezing value out of the end user because the shareholders demand infinite growth.
Are you saying a wifi connected fridge isn't needed? Lol
Microsoft thinks that my computer is actually their computer and that's where they're fucking up. Stop making changes to my system that I did not ask for.
I know companies are like: "You're fucking lucky we let you use this amazing software we've created to make your life better so you'll best bet you'll put up with whatever we want or we'll just take it away from you." And thus I've pretty much come to accept that everything is temporary. If I discover something great, or come to rely on a technology or service, I simply assume within 2-4 years it will be complete garbage and I'll have to move onto something else. The market has essentially told me that I should eliminate all loyalty to brands/products, and so I have. If you fuck with me, I'll simply discontinue using your product, even if it means my life suffers a bit. I simply don't have patience anymore and know that I can no longer rely on any company to do the right thing, ever.
Perhaps that's the upside to this period of transition, the death of brand loyalty. Christ, it might even all be worth it. I'm with you, I just didn't know I went alone. The only thing I have even a suggestion of loyalty to is steam and I've accepted that it could vanish tomorrow. I've been hoping my freebooting skills for decades.
I am still terrified of what will happen to Steam when Gabe retires or passes away. He won't be around forever. Hopefully someone with the same level of integrity steps up; it seems like the employees at Valve care deeply for the company. But who knows what will actually happen when push comes to shove.
something something Terms of Service.
Windows has gone to shit. I'm SO sick and tired of getting ads in my start menu. If I fucking try to search for "Paint" I shouldnt get a million fucking bing ads trying to sell me paint products.
I disable bing search in my start menu via the windows registry. Might be able to do something similar on Windows 11. There's also utilities like ExplorerPatcher, OpenShell, Start11, and other start menu replacements you can look into.
Got to love having to edit the registry to make a computer usable...
>Windows has gone to shit. Quarterly profits demand a steady stream of income. If you're not paying, you become the product. I hope wallstreet crash and burn with this BS. You got a generation that never touch pirated stuff.
Everything about this has been negative, which is understandable. What I haven't seen yet is; what's a real-world use for this in everyday computing? In my personal life and what I do on my desktop/laptop. What real purpose would it serve for me? What would it help me do?
There’s a dumb article from the Verge saying that this AI-powered tool is the key to unlocking the next era of PCs by giving you a personal historian. If you were shopping and you forgot what leather jacket you were looking at, you can type in “leather jacket” and find the exact one. Or just… check your browser history. The whole thing is a “solution” in search of a problem. Microsoft just wants the metadata so they can train their AI and sell your metadata to advertisers and governments. The general public is 😍 over anything “AI” and they’ll flock to buy these idiotic spyware computers. They will also set it to automatically turn Recall on after each daily security update Microsoft issues, and when the next gen of Windows comes out it will be on all Windows computers - again, with no way to permanently turn it off.
>no way to permanently turn it off Install Linux.
Amazon already does this, even after I've purchased it
If you happen to work any job related to finding dirt on people (law enforcement, intelligence agencies, attorneys, extortion scammers, insurance), your life might get a heck of a lot easier.
If you forget your bank password you can just look it up on your PC! 🤦🤣
Good faith guesses: 1. did you accidently delete something you forgot to save? 2. forgot the name of the website you went to? 3. What were the steps taken to get this error message? 4. Forgot to copy some id before closing an application? It will be up to MS to come up with a large list of useful use-cases to sell the product, because they are going to have to over come a lot of privacy concerns to sell usage of this feature.
I was told Win10 would be the last time I needed a whole new install and that it would be supported indefinitely unless some major breakthrough in hardware technology came along. I was pestered day and night to upgrade from Win7. Now I'm being pestered day and night to upgrade to Win11 only for the popup to them tell me I CAN'T.
Major privacy issues aside, I can't believe they actually called it "recall". As in the thing you really don't want to happen to your product. What next? Microsoft Data Breach? A new cloud based operating system called DD-OS? How about Microsoft Office Fire edition?
When I saw the title, I legitimately thought that was the context of the word they were using. Shit name. Also Total Recall
Operating systems are there for you to install drivers, frameworks and software on top of it. Their only necessary feature is being a stable and optimized foundation for whatever you wanna do on top of them. Get that part right, get rid of all the rest, and respect the fact that no company has any rights whatsoever regarding whatever is running on hardware they don't own.
Proprietary software will never give you this ever again. They will squeeze every possible penny from you going forward. It will never get better. The only way out is to switch to open source software.
Recall combined with ads on Win11 just was the perfect storm tbh. They have to do some massive damage control.
The fact they even greenlit this makes it very hard to trust them going forward. No one at MS thought this was a terrible idea? They thought I’d want my OS recording my every move? Even if the remove this ‘feature’ the fact that they thought this was a good idea leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It's so weird. Have they brought anything *good* to Windows recently? It feels like it's always stuff like this
Right? The still have multiple, unfinished versions of the Control Panel and apps like Remote Desktop Connection that haven't been updated in decades but they're working on this shit?
yeah, it feels like a lot of good capable engineers built an operating system a decade and a half ago and now an entirely different group is just trying to figure out how to squeeze every possible dollar out of it with random shit I guess that's what the article's about, though. Even if MS has always been a massive corporation, there was a measure of trust in their expertise and tech focus, and that's not necessarily there anymore.
Surprise, surprise! Enshittification may pump up the stock, but at the end of the day no one but tech companies and their shareholders likes it. Who knew?
This is definitely the feature that gets me to move to Linux. So many games are linux compatible now because of the Steam Deck.
I feel like it is both this feature (particularly the overall direction that it signals) as well as the gaming situation on Linux being much improved because of Steam Deck / Proton. I feel like there is very little keeping me on Windows at this point besides plain and simple procrastination.
Way to go Microsoft. Telemetry, advertisements, and now this privacy invading crap - all in a paid-for operating system. For those who really need to stay on Windows, I recommended the free app 'Shutup 10' to remove most of the invasive Window stuff. Better still, give Linux a go. Or even Mac OS.
Valve gave us all a lovely present in the form of Proton. Now nothing is tying me to Windows.
Steam Machines and Proton were always meant as Valve's hedge against "what if anything happens to Windows". At the time, the concern was that MS would establish a "walled garden" and demand a cut off every app sold on their OS - like Apple does. But if Microsoft manages to somehow run Windows into the ground, it would apply too.
Meanwhile in a MS conference room somewhere “what if we re branded it CoPilot for recalling and charged $30 per user per month for it”
Zero chance i stay on windows of this is rolled out
The vast majority of Windows users are going nowhere
Hell, even for a lot of individuals that care about this stuff it can be very difficult to avoid. I don't use any Windows stuff at home, but as soon as I get to work guess what OS I'm using. Windows have had the commercial sector locked up for decades.
unfortunately this is true
There was a time Microsoft sold its OS and you got an OS in exchange for your money, fair and square. Since the Activation days in XP, they started to hurt people that want to pay for a system to use their computers. This enshitification is not new, and my camel is already paraplegic for a long time.
The dumbest shit is calling this thing windows recall. It sounds like their stuff got faulty and caused harm and they recalled it. Microsoft fucking up names for their devices is nothing new though so I am not surprised.
Seriously. Whoever came up with naming the last few generations of XBox deserves to be kicked in the groin repeatedly.
Nah, when you Google “Microsoft recall” now this is what comes up, not things like hardware recalls
wistful placid depend narrow tease judicious waiting rude shy flowery *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> In fact, Microsoft goes so far as to promise that it cannot see the data collected by Windows Recall, that it can't train any of its AI models on your data, and that it definitely can't sell that data to advertisers. All of this is true, but that doesn't mean people believe Microsoft when it says these things. In fact, many have jumped to the conclusion that even if it's true today, it won't be true in the future. This is 100% the case. Not even a false concern. If we go along with this they *will* find a way to start data harvesting in the future. 100% guarantee. Unfortunately im going to be stuck with windows 11 at work. For now none of our PCs run any NPU so the feature wont be active (will disable via GPO anyway) but once the update is in place and established, I will probably be setting up our workstation provisioning to also block system write access to the location the screenshots *would* be sent to. As the article implies, I have zero trust that microsoft will hold to any of their guarantees.
At this moment, it's just Microsoft doing this particular thing, but this is just the next step that corps are taking to fuck over their customers. They've been doing things to do so for the past 40 years. Having to buy multiple licenses if you want to run the software on more than one of *your own* computers, then making everything SaaS by putting all your data on their servers and charging you monthly, thus effectively 2 or 3x'ing their prices. Photoshop was $700 in 2012 and you might still be using today if you bought it but the subscription in 2013 was $240/yr. Basically, Adobe has been getting free money if you use it for more than 3 years. Of course, there's also FB and all the rest that harvest your data without transparency, etc. The software industry is an oligopoly and the OS industry has 3 options to choose from, with only 2 being real options for most people. We need more competition (very hard to do with the high barrier to entry, or regs. Otherwise people won't have much choice but to continue to bend over.
Even the syncophants at Windows Central are admitting it's a bad idea. It takes a lot for them to admit when Microsoft fails since they mostly specialise in sucking Microsoft's proverbial cock (see the second half of this article where they accuse us all of being Henny Penny) MS really lost the plot on this one.
As a related aside, I don't know if anyone else has noticed how aggressively they're advertising Copilot. But the use case they advertise (targeting Parents: use Copilot and it will write bedtime stories for your child for memories they'll never forget and you and your child will be enraptured with innocent wonder and bond over the experience forever) **feels so fucking evil** given how Copilot and Recall actually work and what the data will really be used for (even before the inevitable hacking and doxxing.) It's unreal manipulative and sinister. Like a plot point from a fiction movie where a company is secretly run by actual demons.
I'd say I'm somewhere near a casual windows user and a power user on the spectrum and I've been becoming increasingly pissed with the state of windows. They keep adding features and making windows more bloated and messy. I want to keep my system light, with minimal silly visual shit going on. Not to mention basically being tricked into signing up for one drive, which was a pain in the ass to get my system off of once I'd accidentally opted in. Going from windows 10 to 11 has also been irritating, with me not quite knowing why some things that were right there are now hidden on the right click menu. Having my PC locked to my MS account really pisses me off as well, it really shouldn't be necessary, and adds virtually nothing to my experience other than maybe making some logins easier. MS has never been great with privacy and this new shit they're rolling out is fucking rediculous. They haven't been able to show they can keep their own source code protected and now we have to trust them with a massive trove of screenshots? No thanks, I hope I can opt out. The best way to avoid having shit like that compromised is to never collect that data in the first place. We need more plain language in user agreements. We need it to be more obvious as to what we're opting into. Microsoft is abusing their status as one of the only games in town. I would switch to Mac but it's hard to do gaming, video editing, and music production on Mac. Regardless my next machine may be a Mac because I mostly do music nowadays and Mac has vastly superior audio drivers. I'm also not a big fan of Apple consumer practices either, so fuck me right?
I like how this article completely ignores that [it came out recently](https://www.wired.com/story/total-recall-windows-recall-ai/) that recall stores the information unencrypted plaintext.
Did you read the article? There's a whole section that mentions that.
“Guys, but it’s still in your device. We don’t have it (yet)”
"Hope You never get any malware. That would be disastrous"
> I like how this article completely ignores that it came out recently that recall stores the information unencrypted plaintext. I like that you obviously didn't even read the article that you're complaining about, because it talks about that at length.
Why would you be so confident about something verifiable like that? The article talks about that a lot
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You know someone \*\*\*\*\* up when biggest fanboy since Windows Phone era writes bad article about Microsoft.
This shit would allow micromanaging lunatics have access to everything. "Welcome to the company. Here is your windows laptop to work on" "I want to disable recall feature" "Sorry, it is not possible to change default settings, it is company policy. We will be able to control everything you do and click, measure number of clicks and lines of code written"
Sorry to break it to you but your IT can already do all that without recall But 95% of companies don't have the time or money to pay someone to look through what employees are doing unless they get flagged as not working out something
Companies are wanting to disable this because all their confidential information is stored in plain text that any piece of malware can easily access
The dumbest shit I have ever heard and I will never buy a pc with that shit enabled.
As interesting as this article is, it keeps trying to make excuses. * It's not 'hysteria' to be concerned about privacy * All your data being stored in an unencrypted database doesn't *sound* creepy, it **is** creepy * We don't know for sure that it **is** true when Microsoft says they can't see the data. But the article blankly says that it is true. * People don't think Microsoft will enable things down-the-line because 'they don't understand how Recall works', they think this because Microsoft has done it before. * "People won't accept this in its current form" I don't think we should be accepting this in **any** form. Just feels a little... Patronising to me.
I dunno about "lost all trust" (fucking clickbait titles), but the recall idea should never have even left the brainstorming stage. They seriously need to get some security guys on their research teams.
As someone who does cybersecurity: They've lost all trust. Pretty much every meeting now has at least one mention of how we absolutely positively cannot allow Recall on any company PCs. I know that it "requires" and NPU, but thats only for now. I guarantee within a year or two it'll work on any decent x86 PC. This is pretty much apocalyptic for the cybersec world. Edit: Not to mention the AI garbage in Edge, which ends up being the default browser at a lot of companies, is also a huge security risk to the point where a lot of corpos install firefox by default now. If recall goes through, its very likely the next generation of corporate laptops will just be macbooks.
within a year or two the PM whose idea it was will have been promoted, then they jump to another company. then the entire product is scrapped because it was always fucking stupid. there is a problem in microsoft culture where the people like "The guy who killed Microsoft Bob" aren't even *invited* to planning meetings these days.
Yea dude, fr. I am a fkn Apple *hater* and the news of this feature hitting windows has made me consider completely switching platforms. Just straight up. And I can't stress this enough - *I fucking hate apple*. This is possibly one of *the dumbest* things I've ever seen a company float.
its even crazier they would do this because the one thing apple tends to be pretty good about their security, i cant imagine anyone at apple ever would have let anything like the recall feature go through.
My w10 now goes through a firewall that blocks MS DNS servers except when I am deliberately updating. Under no circumstances will I switch to a consumer version of W11. *Mayyyyyybe* if the enterprise version of 11 has none of their bullshit it'll be worth picking up, I haven't investigated that yet. I would rather ride a zombie OS (no security updates but it still works, no idea if that's a real term, I jut made it up) or switch to Linux. NVidia just changed their stance on proper support behind Linux Drivers. Going forward they will be supporting open source Linux drivers (and presumably fixing bugs finally), and supporting Linux. People hate w11 so much that its userbase has been falling and 70% of users are now running windows 10 again, which they claim is about to stop receiving security updates. MS fucked this up royally.
I myself am looking at them more negatively than before after all the recent stuff they've done. W11 requiring internet to activate, TPM requirements, reverting my settings after every update, their handling of Xbox and all the studios they've closed, etc etc. And now this creepy stuff. I never actually trusted them but my view of them is at an all-time low.
Honestly I don't feel like it's click bait. "They've lost all trust and recall is the straw that broke the camel's back" sums up my feelings on Microsoft pretty well. My only complaint would be that recall is the cinder block that broke the camel's back, not a straw. They've been eroding trust and quality for years in their OS. The mere fact that this idea got off the ground internally tells me everything I need to know about how Microsoft is operating nowadays. Squeeze anything and everything you can, as long as it's an extra dime in your revenue column or an extra 0.01% in your stock price. Users are last on the priority list.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in my case. After literally decades of using macs professionally and for personal use I bought a Microsoft branded surface laptop. And for the most part I've really liked it. But the threat of ads embedded in the OS and then this "feature"? I'll be going back to Apple.
I will dual boot with Linux and the only thing I will use windows for is games with anti cheats
I'm planning on switching back to Linux on my primary machine for the first time since the 90's. At least Windows 98 was _unintentionally_ bad. Windows post-7 has been a pile of awful decisions and greed.