Ars Technica took a look at how the current version of Windows Recall works, including the improvements Microsoft made since the initial security nightmare of a rollout, and concludes:
Recall continues to demand an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned. However secure and private it is—and, again, the version people will actually get is much better than the version that caused the original controversy—it just feels creepy to open up the app and see confidential work materials and pictures of your kid. You’re already trusting Microsoft with those things any time you use your PC, but there’s something viscerally unsettling about actually seeing evidence that your computer is tracking you, even if you’re not doing anything you’re worried about hiding, even if you’ve excluded certain apps or sites, and even if you “know” that part of the reason why Recall requires a Copilot+ PC is because it’s processing everything locally rather than on a server somewhere.
↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica
Way back in 1996, Mercedes-Benz unveiled the A-Class, a small, practical car that purported to be more premium than cheaper, similarly-sized cars from other brands. The car had a big problem, though – it was unusually narrow and tall, and because of it, it famously failed spectacularly at the “moose test”, in which a car has to suddenly swerve around a “moose” on the road. The car simply toppled over, and after initially denying the problem, Mercedes recalled every single A-Class sold and added a variety of mitigations like electronic stability control and suspension changes. As far as I can recall, it fixed the issue.
To this day, however, I cannot look at an A-Class, even the modern ones which look like normal hatchbacks and bear effectively zero resemblance to the original, quirky A-Class from 1996, and not think of the failed moose test and the recall. I know the modern A-Class won’t fail that test, and I know it’s an infinitely safer car than the original one, but my brain still makes that connection every time I see one. A lot of people my age, whether they’re into cars or not, seem to remember this recall, because the original A-Class was such a unique and recognisable vehicle at the time, especially coming from Mercedes.
My point is – Recall will face this same issue. No matter how secure Microsoft makes it, no matter how much they claim and prove it only runs locally, no matter how hard they try and hammer on the fact data never leaves your PC, people will always think of that initial botched rollout, and all the accurate reporting that Recall was a nightmare. And it just so happens that the skepticism is warranted, and hopefully keeps people from using this corporate Trojan horse.
> and hopefully keeps people from using this corporate Trojan horse.
The horse will be there, whether people use it or not, and shove itself into the city.
It might be that right now it does process everything locally (I wouldn’t take Microsoft’s word for that – someone needs to independently audit that!), but the temptation to upload some or all of it to the cloud for training AI/telemetry etc. will probably be too great for Microsoft to resist in the long term. Needing Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs might limit its scope right now, but in a few years time, all new PCs will be Copilot+ branded/capable and most users will have moved to Windows 11 by then. At that point, Microsoft might start uploading some of that precious data because its value to them is too great.
rklrkl,
That’s a very real possibility. Companies may say one thing in order to convince consumers it’s not so bad, but companies understand that once something is normalized they can always go in and increase the scope later. So many remote dependencies are absolute BS and although the osnews audience understand this the tech giants know that it’s not savvy users who they need to convince, it’s the masses who are both ignorant and apathetic. They are the ones who through sheer numbers will change the norms.
What bothers me is “why force that on users” even if nobody wants it.
Considering the development cost, one possible answer is : a secret agenda is hidden. Another one : the good old “sunk cost fallacy”.
Probably both.
After what, 30 years of users just accepting things because, well “they’ll get used to it” and most of em don’t know they have a choice, I cannot even blame M$ to continue.
I still swear every time I check the scroll bar in Word, and see that it isn’t there. If someone invents a time machine, I’ll give all my life savings just to use it to go to 2013 and persuade otherwise whichever nutjob was responsible of that decision.
cevvalkoala,
I agree that several UIs got worse including scrollbars. But if you actually had the ability to go back to 2013, there would probably be more important things to warn the world about.
You gotta start somewhere.
> Considering the development cost, one possible answer is : a secret agenda is hidden.
Hardly secret why a company would want this optimization tool installed on the user’s system. All the advantages of big data squared, but running locally (so “privacy friendly”) and with part of the energy expenditure shoved onto the user base. What is not to like?
I know linux is not perfect, but misred directions.
Please do change to linux, with wine and proton it supports more games than windows does. And yeah, you can use wemod and cheatengine for single player games just fine, just put them in the same bottle.
When you go poetteringware you know you lost your way, pulseaudi was perhaps an option. I still have an ALSA supported chip.
Devuan is great, but voidlinux is just to much faster when benchmarked on XFS
Even if it only processes stuff locally, you’ll get your conversations and, if you do real work on that machine, the customer’s data, that is usually covered by confidentiality agreements, saved into an opaque database that you can’t check and delete stuff out of.
Your precious end to end encrypted Signal conversations will end … in Microsoft’s opaque DB.