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This week Microsoft is hosting its annual developer conference Build from the Seattle Convention Center, and amid the flurry of AI-related announcements from the valuable software company, a false note has been struck among many tech industry followers on X (formerly Twitter).
Of many of Microsoft's announcements, perhaps the biggest was the introduction of new Microsoft Copilot+PCs: laptops and desktop computers equipped with a new version of Microsoft Windows, with the AI assistant Copilot baked into the structure of the operating system itself.
Copilot, in turn, is powered by a series of underlying AI models, including the new GPT-4o introduced last week by Microsoft partner and investment OpenAI.
Still, that one feature in particular, Recall, stood out to some observers – and not in a good way. The Recall feature essentially records a user's screen activity on their Copilot+PC, including mouse movements and application actions (whether a user is sending messages, checking email, editing a document or image) and allows the user to to go and replay it for a detail or interaction they want to access again. Microsoft describes Recall this way in a blog post announcing the Copilot+ PCs:
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“With Recall, you can access virtually everything you've seen or done on your PC in a way that feels like photographic memory. Copilot+ PCs organize information the way we do – based on relationships and associations unique to each of our individual experiences. This helps you remember things you may have forgotten, so you can quickly and intuitively find what you're looking for simply by using the clues you remember.”
Microsoft explained that the feature will allow users to do this “Get back to where you were, whether you go to a specific email in Outlook or the right chat in Teams.”
Microsoft executives equated the feature to a kind of “photographic memory” on your PC:
A program that records all your PC activity may sound Orwellian/dystopian or ill-advised, but in that same blog post the company attempted to allay privacy and security concerns by stating that the data was “entirely stored on your device,” in something called a 'personal semantic index'. As the blog post continues:
“Your snapshots are yours; they remain local on your PC. You can delete individual snapshots, adjust and delete time ranges in Settings, or pause at any time, right from the notification area icon on your taskbar. You can also prevent apps and websites from ever being saved. You're always in control, with privacy you can trust.“
A Microsoft spokesperson reiterated these privacy and security mechanisms during a brief phone call to VentureBeat, and they also stated that the data was stored in an encrypted format on the user's PC and would never be sent to the cloud or the web, and also not it can be used to train Microsoft AI models – on-device or elsewhere. The spokesperson said it was always under the control of the user, and not a company system administrator.
Still, a number of users on X immediately greeted the feature and its demos with alarm. Some even equated it to spyware or keyloggers, malware that records a user's keystrokes and can be used to record sensitive information such as passwords.
Some pointed out the risks of storing even a copy of your PC activity on the device if the device was seized by a hostile party, such as a government agency or security apparatus.
Others recalled how Microsoft itself, as the largest software company in the world given the huge number of devices running variants of Windows and Office, has already fallen victim to many hacks and cyber-attacks, making this type of on-device activity storage a potentially attractive target has become. for hackers.
Even in a milder case where your device is lost or stolen, users expressed concerns that their sensitive information, such as passwords, could be accessed through the Recall feature.
Even X owner Elon Musk joined in on the pile-on of Microsoft's Copilot+PC Recall feature, saying, “This is like a Black mirror episode,” referring to the dystopian sci-fi/horror series on Netflix.
Whether this reaction is justified or not, it will be interesting to see how this affects Microsoft Copilot+ PC sales – if at all – and whether any of the concerns will translate into concrete damage caused by this new Recall feature. Or, in the best case for Microsoft and users of the new devices, the system works as designed and manages to provide the benefits of rewinding into the past without sacrificing privacy and security.