Windows Recall and why you should be concerned.

I'm a touch late on this one, but a few months back Microsoft kicked out a feature called Windows Recall that would be coming in future releases of the operating system. The idea behind this would be that all your activity on the device would be tracked and logged to allow you to roll back and quickly find what you were doing and go back to things that you may have lost track of. All using the power of "AI" to help you navigate that data. 

On the surface that sounds like a great idea. 

However, to do what they are talking about the computer will have to be recording all your activities, what sites you visit, programs that you run, possibly even the keystrokes that you are entering into the system. And that data is going to have to live someplace, and if they are going to be using AI to process that information where is that process going to take place, and what else will they be doing with that information once they have it?

Well turns out the data is going to be saved locally, not in the cloud, and while that's a good thing there have been a couple of posts showing that the data saved on the machine can be pulled from the system and quickly accessed without a lot of fanfare. While the data is on your machine, and arguably a bit more private than something in the cloud, anybody who's able to access your computer could pull the data from your system.

How many people have watched the videos about scammers getting access to systems and pulling data from them? How many of us know people who have had this happen to them? 

If suddenly there's a complete record of everything that you have done on your system, including your banking details and personally identifying information that's going to be gold for people trying to cause you grief, and suddenly Microsoft is collecting that information and putting it in a box for someone to just come grab. 

Personally I don't want the operating system on my computer to be tracking my activities like this. 

I understand that things like Facebook, X, and other social media services track everything that I do, but that's kind of the trade that you make. You get access to a platform and communication services in exchange for the information they can harvest to turn you into a product. 

What I expect from the operating system on my device is to boot the computer and run the programs that I tell it to, and to process data in ways that I expect.

The big issue with this type of functionality being baked into the operating system is that we are trusting that Microsoft is not going to change their mind and start pushing that information to some cloud service for processing, training AI models, or some other activity that we can't control. 

There's always that argument that if you aren't doing anything wrong you won't have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean that you should have to worry about having your entire personal life laid out in front of someone else. You may not be doing anything wrong, but it may not be something that you want posted on the internet for all to see. 

The only way that things like this stop is for us, as consumers, to reject this type of change. For computers this may require that we look at moving to something other than Windows as an operating system. Linux, macOS, something else? Who knows. 

Right now for gaming Windows is kind of the only option for a lot of people, but if there's a huge shift in the market the game Developers will move. Worst case I'll be keeping two systems sitting around and just using the Windows machine for running some games on.