Microsoft has provided an update on Windows 11’s Recall feature – which has been on hold for a while now as its revelation caused a stir due to security and privacy concerns – and when it plans to move forward with the feature and to bring these to Copilot+ PCs.
Like the BBC According to reports, Microsoft said in a statement that it plans to launch Recall on CoPilot+ laptops in November, implementing a number of measures to ensure the feature is secure enough, detailed in a separate blog post.
So, what are these measures meant to appease critics of Recall – a capability that consists of a super-powerful, AI-powered search feature in Windows 11 that uses regular screenshots (“snapshots” as Microsoft calls them) of the activity on your PC – as it was originally envisioned?
One of the key changes is that Recall will be strictly opt-in, as Microsoft had previously told us, as opposed to the standard approach taken when the feature was first revealed.
Microsoft notes: “During the installation of Copilot+ PCs, users will be given a clear option whether they want to opt in to save snapshots with Recall. If a user does not proactively choose to enable it, it will be disabled and no snapshots will be taken or saved.”
Additionally, as Microsoft previously told us, snapshots (and other Recall-related data) will be fully encrypted and Windows Hello authentication will be a requirement to use the feature. In other words, you need to sign in through Hello to make sure you’re actually using Recall (and not someone else on your PC).
In addition, Recall will use a secure environment, a so-called Virtualization-based Security Enclave, or VBS Enclave, a completely secure virtual machine isolated from the Windows 11 system, which only the user can access with a decryption key (included with the Windows Hello version ). login).
David Weston, who wrote the Microsoft blog post and is VP of Enterprise and OS Security, explained this Windows Central: “All sensitive Recall processes, i.e. screenshots, screenshot processing, vector database, are now in a VBS enclave. We essentially put Recall in a virtual machine (VM) so that even administrative users won’t be able to interact, run code, or view data in that VM.”
By the way, Microsoft cannot look at your Recall data either. And as the software giant has made clear before, all of this data is kept locally on your machine – none of it is sent to the cloud (if it were, that could be a major security problem). This is why Recall is exclusive to Copilot+ PC, by the way – because it needs a powerful NPU for acceleration and local processing to make Recall run responsive enough (since the cloud can’t be used to speed up the AI grunt work).
Finally, Microsoft is addressing an earlier concern about Recall taking screenshots of, for example, your online banking site and potentially sensitive financial information: the feature now filters out things like passwords, credit card numbers and so on.
Other measures to tighten privacy include the ability to exclude specific apps or websites from ever having snapshots taken by Recall (and we should note that private browsing sessions, like Chrome’s incognito mode, will never are subject to a screenshot – at least in supported web browsers).
By the way, an icon will appear in the taskbar when a Recall snapshot is saved, and it’s easy to pause these screenshots from there if you want.
Analysis: Recalled from the bench, but with a lot to prove
Microsoft has essentially taken Recall back to the drawing board on security and privacy in recent months, and by and large the results are worth commending. (Although, let’s be honest, elements like strict encryption should have already been in place – and it’s a bit scary that they weren’t).
If you are still concerned about Recall despite these measures, you simply do not need to enable it. And now that it’s clearly disabled by default, there’s no danger of less tech-savvy people accidentally using the feature without realizing what it is.
The path Recall is on now is that it’s going back to testing in October, so very soon, and with the release coming to Copilot+ PCs in November, it’s on a fast track to arriving at the computing crowd – well, those who We did that and invested in a Copilot+ laptop. We’re sure Recall will still be marked as in ‘preview’ for those people and the question is whether you should take the plunge with a skill like this if it isn’t quite finished yet.
Of course, we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here: the next step is to get Recall into the test builds of Windows 11, and see what Windows Insiders think. If any issues occur in these preview builds, Recall may be delayed for release on Copilot+ PCs.
Microsoft is undoubtedly talking about a much bigger security play here for Recall, and let’s hope there are no setbacks or mistakes in the actual implementation of all this. Given the way the first incarnation of Recall was put together – with a worrying lack of attention to detail – it’s easy to be cynical here, but presumably Microsoft won’t fall into this trap again.