Microsoft Hits The Brakes On Recall Feature, Will Not Ship To Copilot+ PCs Next Week

To say the fiasco surrounding Microsoft’s new “Recall” feature is controversial would be an understatement – the AI-powered feature, set to debut on Copilot+ PCs on June 18, is met with vast criticism from the public and security experts alike. So controversial, in fact, that regulators in the UK has started to investigate the matter. Now, the company has officially announced it’s putting the feature on hold until further notice.

You can read on this opinion piece to get up to speed on this feature, and why I think nobody should use it due to the huge privacy implications it poses.

Recall, Recalled

“Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program in the coming weeks,” Microsoft wrote in an updated blog post of the feature. The company says it is “adjusting the release model for Recall to leverage the expertise of the Windows Insider community” to ensure Recall meets the “high standards for quality and security.”

A big reason why Recall was embroiled in deep controversy was the huge privacy risk associated with a highly intrusive feature that reads, scans, and logs your activity on your PC once every few seconds. While the software giant assured that hackers will require physical access to the device to extract info, this does little to convince the skeptics – especially as techniques were quickly devised to extract the data even with remote access.

Shortly after, Microsoft has first backtracked by announcing that Recall will be opt-in (meaning it is turned off by default) before the feature ships out to all Copilot+ PCs, and it also mandated the use of Windows Hello to implement “just-in-time” decryption, and will remain encrypted otherwise.

With Recall now taken off the release channel, the upcoming Copilot+ PCs lost one of its headlining features to help laptop makers sell the so-called “AI PCs”, though with the notoriety that this feature has gained through this incident, it’s hard to say the reception would be well when Microsoft eventually fixes the flaws and releases it for the second time.

Pokdepinion: If I have to change how this feature works, first it has to be completely removed from the OS and only make it an optional add-on. Any traces of it on the system, even when disabled, is still an attack vector that makes hackers drool.