Microsoft’s highly controversial artificial intelligence feature Recall, developed for Windows 11, was postponed after its planned release date due to a series of security concerns. Originally planned to be offered with Copilot Plus PCs on June 18, Recall was shelved for a while due to negative developments and security risks. Microsoft decided to strengthen security protocols before offering this feature and took a logical step in this direction.
Last month, Microsoft announced that it would offer Recall to Windows Insider users for testing in October. However, with a new statement today, it was announced that Recall would be allowed to be completely removed from systems. If the feature is removed, the artificial intelligence model supporting this function will also be deleted. When it is offered again, it will be closed by default and will need to be opened manually. Recall, which is made more secure by connecting with the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) in terms of security, can only be used on Copilot Plus PCs and can be closed in certain applications if desired.
What is Recall and Why Was It Criticized?
Recall is described as “a photographic memory of everything you do on your computer.” This feature, which allows users to search through content on their computers up to weeks ago, was presented as a very advanced past search system. However, when basic details about the feature were revealed, many users began to express privacy concerns. When activated, Recall takes screenshots of everything on your computer and analyzes and stores these images.
Although Microsoft stated that the screenshots taken would only remain on computers and would be processed locally by processors, this explanation did not completely satisfy users. In particular, security researcher Kevin Beaumont’s statements in 2020 revealed that Recall analyzes screenshots with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology and stores the content in a database as plain text. The concern that this database could be open to malicious people made this feature a major security risk.
Beaumont stated that the screenshots taken were processed every few seconds and the results were written to an SQLite database on the device. This meant that everything viewed on your computer was being recorded in text, potentially allowing hackers to access this data in seconds, and Recall has sparked a huge privacy and security debate.
