Microsoft
Microsoft will start sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs starting in October, Microsoft said. Today’s update has been posted. To the company’s original blog post about the product recall controversy. The company did not elaborate on the specific changes it would make to the product recall beyond what it already announced in June.
For those who don’t know, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible computers, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, and then clearing those screenshots usingOptical character recognition (OCR), and saves OCR text and screenshots in a giant, searchable database on your computer. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to help users retrace their steps and find information about things they’ve used their computers to search for or do in the past.
The problem was that other users on the same computer, or attackers with physical or remote access to your computer, could easily access, view, and export these screenshots and OCR database since none of the information at rest was encrypted or protected in any substantial way.
Microsoft was planning to launch Recall as one of the main features of the Copilot+ PC that launched in July, alongside the new Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Surface devices, but its launch was delayed and then paused entirely so that Recall could be reworked and then sent to Windows Insiders for testing like most other Windows features.
Among the changes Microsoft said it will make: The database will be encrypted at rest and will require users to authenticate (and re-authenticate periodically) using Windows Hello before they can access it. The feature will also be turned off by default, whereas the original plan was to have it on by default and have users go into Settings to turn it off.
“Security remains our top priority and when Recall is available to Windows Insiders in October, we will publish a blog with more details,” said Microsoft corporate vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri in a blog update today.
When the preview is released, Windows Insiders who want to test the Recall Preview will need to do so on a PC that meets Microsoft’s Copilot+ system requirements. These include a processor with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. x86 versions of Windows for Intel and AMD processors currently do not support any Copilot+ features regardless of whether or not a PC meets these requirements, but that is expected to change later this year.
However, the security researchers and reporters who discovered the vulnerabilities in the original version of Recall were only able to find them because it was possible to enable them on unsupported computers, just as it is possible to run Windows 11 on computers that don’t meet the system requirements. It’s likely that users will figure out how to enable Recall and other Copilot+ features on unsupported computers at some point, too.