Microsoft
Microsoft’s new Recall feature is like having a stalker built-in a PC
Is the new Recall feature, an AI tool recording your activity for easy retrieval, a game-changer or a privacy concern?
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Microsoft just announced a wild new feature for Windows 11 called “Recall.” This AI-powered tool is like having a photographic memory for your computer, recording everything you do so you can search through it later.
Yup, Recall is basically a digital trail of breadcrumbs for every app you’ve opened, every website you’ve visited, and every document you’ve viewed.
Imagine scrolling through a timeline of your entire computer history, finding that one email you read last week or that chat you had last month with just a few quick searches.
That’s what Recall promises. It uses AI to analyze snapshots of your activity and suggest actions, making it easy to pick up where you left off.
You’re going to need a lot of PC power to use
But there’s a catch—you’ll need some beefy specs to run Recall. As Bleeping Computer points out, you’ll need a Copilot+ PC with a Snapdragon X chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.
You’ll have plenty of options, but almost every major PC maker is already rolling out these kinds of machines.
The list includes Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, and Asus to offer Copilot Plus PCs, so we’re talking widespread adoption here. You can find a complete list of them on Microsoft’s website.
Microsoft is trying to reassure people about privacy, saying that Recall works at the hardware level and stores all data locally on your device. You can control what gets captured, delete snapshots, and even pause it whenever you want.
But the question remains—how secure is this recorded data? If someone gets access to your device, could they access all your activity logs? Microsoft hasn’t answered that yet.
Recall is an undeniably powerful tool, but it’s also a little terrifying. Do we really want our computers recording everything we do?
It’s like having a little AI stalker watching your every move, just waiting for you to ask it to recall something. Sure, it could be useful, but at what cost to our privacy?
It’s going to be interesting to see how people react to this. On one hand, the ability to search through your entire computer history could be a game-changer.
On the other hand, this isn’t a new idea either. I’ve been using something eerily similar for almost eight months with an app called Rewind, now called Limitless. It’s amazing and extremely useful.
But as I imagine how most feel about this somewhat surveillance tech, if a hacker could access this information, let’s just say that we would all be at risk of exposing our personal and financial information.
Microsoft is framing Recall as a solution to the problem of search being broken on Windows. But is the solution really to just record everything and hope for the best? It feels like they’re solving one problem by creating an even bigger one.
We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out. But for now, Recall feels like a feature that’s as fascinating as it is unsettling. Learn more about Recall here.
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Editors’ Recommendations:
- Microsoft introduces Copilot Pro, a $20/month AI assistant
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- iOS 18 may get Safari AI assistant and encrypted visual search
- OpenAI unveils GPT-4o: Everything you need to know
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