A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel's back

lemme in@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 1639 points – A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel's back
windowscentral.com

It's a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a new AI tool designed to remember everything you do on Windows. The feature that we never asked and never wanted it.

Microsoft, has done a lot to degrade the Windows user experience over the last few years. Everything from obtrusive advertisements to full-screen popups, ignoring app defaults, forcing a Microsoft Account, and more have eroded the trust relationship between Windows users and Microsoft.

It's no surprise that users are already assuming that Microsoft will eventually end up collecting that data and using it to shape advertisements for you. That really would be a huge invasion of privacy, and people fully expect Microsoft to do it, and it's those bad Windows practices that have led people to this conclusion.

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Microsoft has built a number of safety features into Windows Recall to ensure that the service can't run secretly in the background. When Windows Recall is enabled, it places a permanent visual indicator icon on the Taskbar to let the user know that Windows Recall is capturing data. This icon cannot be hidden or moved.

Oh my, that one is really cute

Well find out in 10 years that that wasn’t true and that it did capture data when the icon wasn’t present whoopsies.

If chkCaptureData.checked then
   recall()
   bigNotify()
Else
   recall()
End

This icon cannot be hidden or moved.

Or what? Your computer will take out a club and beat you to death?

You can't convince me someone couldn't do it with a simple registry edit, or even just replace the icon with something else by swapping an icon file somewhere in Windows/