Screenshots taken automatically “every few seconds”: the new Recall feature unveiled by Microsoft on Monday May 20 raises concerns about the protection of user data. It is one of the tools offered by the Tech giant on its new range of Windows Copilot PCs, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). By continuously taking screenshots and analyzing them, Recall will provide very powerful and simplified search capabilities for users.
Today, “we send emails to ourselves to remember things or we leave tabs open in our browser,” underlined Yusuf Mehdi, vice president of Microsoft, during the “keynote” presenting Copilot. Regretting that it is easier to look for something on the internet than on your own PC, he presents Recall as a revolutionary feature that comes close to the way the human mind organizes its memories, a sort of “photographic memory” allowing one to find easily something that one vaguely remembers having seen, without even needing to find a keyword that was written on the screen at the time.
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This PowerPoint at the office a few days ago, for example, in which there was a graph with red bars… All you have to do is ask Recall to search for “a graph with red bars” for it to find the moment where it had appeared on the screen, reopening the application it was in with one click, directly to the correct slide. The same goes for these blue shoes that caught our eye on we don’t really know which online sales site, which we lost when we closed the tab. With Recall, a search for “blue shoes” and we are directly on the right web page to resume window shopping. It will also be possible to navigate directly in time via a timeline to trace your activity.
This new technology obviously raises security questions around the data collected. Screenshots “stay on your PC, making the experience secure and fast,” promises Carolina Hernandez, heads of AI experiences at Microsoft. They are “encrypted and saved on your PC’s hard drive,” the company specifies on its site. And they will not come out of it, insists Yusuf Mehdi, who explains that the screenshots “will not be used to train artificial intelligence”. They will be analyzed directly on the PC, with integrated AI.
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The user maintains “full control” over the screenshots of their activity taken by Recall and can delete any if they wish, the company promises. The feature can exclude certain applications or websites upon user request, and also does not record private browsing activity on the Microsoft Edge browser. Recall can also be temporarily disabled.
On the other hand, Recall “does not hide information such as passwords or bank account numbers,” warns Microsoft, which raises questions about what can happen in the event of loss, theft or hacking of the device. computer, despite data encryption. The retention period for screenshots varies depending on the space available on the hard drive, but Microsoft cites a default period of around three months based on 25 GB used.
The functionality will only be deployed on new PCs in the Copilot range. They also integrate other tools using AI, such as Cocreator, which allows you to generate an image by roughly drawing and describing what you want, or Live caption, which subtitles and translates a conversation almost instantly.