this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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Microsoft's new Recall AI will take screenshots of everything you do - freaky [Mircosoft: "capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds"] (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (3 children)

The only reason Microsoft can push this as a 'service' now is that 90% of users do not care about, let alone understand any of the technology they use. Doctors, lawyers, CEOs, politicians, even most engineers, have no fucking clue what an operating system is, what "AI" is or why it would be a bad idea to feed 100% of your activity into a black box controlled by a megacorp. And good luck trying to explain to them why something like this might be bad, you need to lay out so much groundwork that by the time you get to training data privacy concerns they have already scrolled though 500 shitposts on TikTok.

It continues to blow me away that these projects get implemented as the only people who can do the work must also understand why it is a bad idea.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Im sure lots of corporations will have a problem with this when they realize all company data is compromised.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

It will likely be protected in those cases behind the 365 environment which encloses copilot and prevents training on company data. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/privacy-and-protections

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

If they listen to their IT department.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Someone yesterday posted the spec requirements for this service and it doesn't appear to be meant for everyday users. It requires massive storage space on a fast SSD and also an NPU (Nueral Processing Unit).

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Right, it needs the NPU because the data is stored and processed locally. Guess what, your computer/OS already knows everything you do.

Yet another nothing-burger for the internet to rage about.

I don't use Windows for other reasons, but every useful application I use on a daily basis has some sort of history. Browsers remember pages I've visited, my editor has undo levels, terminal has a searchable scrollback buffer, my shell can recall pretty much every command I've ever run.

And yet none of them work together. I've been thinking about Recall though, and I think the only use case I would have would be to have it summarize my daily activities on a work machine. Quite often I join morning standups, or a standup after a long weekend, and I'm like "wtf did I do yesterday?". I'd love to have an AI remind me I spent 3 hours on Teams dealing with a co-worker's issue, or how long I spent researching something in order to reply to an e-mail.

Or when you notice you have a follow-up meeting on your calendar and you've completely forgotten what the action items you were supposed to handle from the meeting 2 weeks ago.

Basically there's a ton of QOL activities computers could be doing that require some sort of artificial intelligence to index and retrieve in order to be useful. That involves allowing some sort of local AI access to that data, but as long as the crowd of smooth brained luddites keeps whining that goal is getting further away...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

It's a little bit more than "your os knows everything you do".

Copilot for Windows isn't the same thing as Copilot for 365, although it's similar, and the system requirements only apply if you tell it to process locally. My understanding of the docs is Copilot is cloud based by default.

The issue isn't smooth brained luddites, it's smooth brained casuals giving condom over their personal information to a corporation that has a fiduciary responsibility to profit and grow.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's baffling it's legal to be honest.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

Lawmakers literally do not understand why it could be a problem.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think this may either make me stay on 10 or actively switch over to something free and open source. This is wild, I can't believe people would want this type of "feature". Yeah I can see it being helpful but it is not worth the privacy concerns.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Microsoft records every image on screen

Copy protection like widevine, "Am I a joke to you?"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Black screen, can't search for that show on Disney/Netflix you watched and can't remember

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

"just show an image of a disney movie on screen and you're okay"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not to worry. Someone will build a utility that flashes a spreadsheet image for a millisecond every time the system tries to take a snapshot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Just… turn it off?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Enterprises IT policy may have a say in that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Fair, but that’ll usually be a “fuck no” on their part, not a forced yes.

That said, if your enterprise policies are going to enforce this, they already have something worse enforced as well such as screenshots being uploaded to a centralized database every x minutes. (I’ve personally experienced this.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Will that be an option? We found out this week that "deleting" photos from your iPhone only makes them inaccessible to YOU, they live forever on Apple's servers. Why would MS operate any differently?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

They weren't on apples servers, people were deleting them from the photos app but it wasn't deleting them from the actual filesystem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You can literally kill off anything in windows, albeit with some effort in certain cases. Right down to their telemetry services everyone hates.

Beyond that though, such a system would be quite a lot of load on the hardware running it. In fact, many low end hardware combinations that support 11 likely won’t be able to support such a feature. Not including an off button would be silly. In fact, not making it opt in, similar to gaming clip systems, would be a terrible idea.

Comparing it to a locked down OS with a cloud service tie in I’d like comparing oranges to cars. All signs point to this feature being fully local. What are they going to do, hide gigabytes of video from you just to waste space?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You can literally kill off anything in windows, albeit with some effort in certain cases. Right down to their telemetry services everyone hates.

For now. The only reason Microsoft doesn't prevent you from removing or disabling components of Windows is that it is still an extreme edge case. Only a very small fraction of users actually take part in that kind of activity, if it were to become more popular Microsoft will start baking it in harder.

Comparing it to a locked down OS with a cloud service tie in I’d like comparing oranges to cars.

Windows is already headed down the road of locked down cloud dependency, and minimum specs are a user problem. Remember the thing with TPMs and W11?

What are they going to do, hide gigabytes of video from you just to waste space?

Have you looked at how much space Windows already takes up on your disk?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Decades of history exists in M$ not stopping users from modifying their systems however the hell they want. Your argument against that is “they might eventually.”

How exactly is TPM requirement at all related to cloud anything? They absolutely aren’t moving to cloud dependency, the closest anyone has heard on that is them moving certain enterprise options to subscription, and rumors from unreliable sources. Again, your argument boils down to “they might eventually.”

And what does their current install disk space have to do with anything? 20 gigs for an install is leaps and bounds different than an extra 50+ gigs being used out of nowhere.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

Every time I hear something like this it lessens the sting that I felt moving away from Windows. Fuck Microsoft.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

No thanks. I'll pass, forever. I never want this. It feels creepy and gross.

Succinct perfection.