Pretend AI, aka Microsoft Recall

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Microsoft has again delayed its Recall feature in order to add more security to it. It was planned for release in May 2024, and then put back until October 2024. It is now likely to be released in December 2024, and security testers all over the world are rubbing their hands with glee for the opportunity to break it. When it was first announced, it was going to be on by default, but Microsoft has since back-tracked on this. As it takes screenshots every few seconds and sends them to the cloud, maybe it is an opportunity to create a Big Brother world and a privacy nightmare. It is likely, though, that Microsoft will focus on adding biometric authentications into Recall in order to address security concerns (using Windows Hello authentication).

Preface

What’s the dumbest and most inefficient way to collect data for your computer? Take a screenshot every few seconds, and then play it back like a flickbook. It sounds like the worst student IT project in the world, and it is now a new feature on Copilot+ PCs. And, so, Microsoft, with all the power of OpenAI at its fingertips, has taken one of the dumbest routes to smart AI with the implementation of a recall function: