• Miller@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Very little seems to be beyond the incredulity of MS meetings, remember they had a meeting where someone suggested the OS take a screenshot every ten seconds of whatever the user was doing and upload it to MS servers and rather than everyone laughing they agreed to move it into development.

    • foggenbooty@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Snapshots and the contextual information derived from them are saved and encrypted to your local hard drive. Recall does not share snapshots or associated data with Microsoft or third parties, nor is it shared between different Windows users on the same device. Windows will ask for your permission before saving snapshots. You are always in control of what apps and websites get saved in snapshots, and you can delete snapshots, pause or turn them off at any time. Any future options for the user to share data will require fully informed explicit action by the user.

      Considering the thread we’re talking in, it’s up to you if you trust MS to implement this well, but they are not uploading the screenshots to the cloud.

      Personally I think the idea of Recall is great if it works to help you and only you. The problem isn’t the idea, it’s the trust. If a reputable open source project or Linux distro made a feature like this I think it would be cool, because I know my privacy is going to be respected and the feature is designed solely to help me and nothing more. However, when MS suggests this I’m immediately cautious, skeptical, and concerned about how it could be used against me.

      • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        The statement you quoted is itself a lie. It talks about snapshots, when that’s not at all what Recall is about. It takes snapshots, true. But it does not matter to MS whether the snapshots themselves are saved, or where. “Recall does not share snapshots or associated data” is a reference solely to the snapshot itself, not the data Recall creates from it.

        Here’s what really happens. Once a snapshot is taken, it is analyzed with AI as well as converted into text (if text is present) and all that content (including passwords, banking details, medical records, whatever passes the desktop when a snapshot is taken) plus its local AI analysis is kept in a local database. That shrinks its size to almost nothing, making it much easier for MS to collect. This secretive local database itself is inaccessible to you (even as admin), one you have zero rights to control or delete or edit or even view, one over which you are never given any permissions, and at regular intervals that database is scraped and sent back to MS to use in data aggregation and resale and AI training and whatever the fuck else they want to do with it. Sure, you can turn off Recall in the AI settings, but it has now been proven that any Windows update just turns it all back on again.

        Knowing this, go back and reread their statement in regard to snapshots. The entire thing is a misdirection and never once addresses the real payload of Recall and why MS, even after they pinky swore they had dropped it, they continued partnering with hardware makers to deliver “Recall-ready” PCs that already have the requisite NPU on the motherboard, which are needed to do all that local data OCR and analysis on the snapshots that don’t even matter to MS once they’ve been scraped for content.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      rather than everyone laughing

      You misspelled “firing the authoritarian nutjob for cause,” which would’ve been the bare minimum of reasonable reactions.

      • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        if that’s bare minimum, what is the upper limit for reasonable reactions? Hang him?