Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust Microsoft hasn't earned (opens in new tab)

"Beaumont says admin access to the system isn’t required to read another user’s Recall database. Another user with an admin account can easily grab any other user’s Recall database and all the Recall screenshots by clicking through a simple UAC prompt."

The person quoted in the article says admin access isn't required and to bolster this gives an example of someone with admin access being able to access the recall database. I'm confused.

Your trust is not required. Like all the "features" Microsoft has forced on its users in the past, it will run on your (their) computer whether you trust them or not. Sure, a few nerds like me will ditch them for other OSes, but most Windows users are trapped, and Microsoft can do whatever it wants to them.

Trust is moot when someone can abuse their position with no consequences. Windows has been the overwhelmingly dominant desktop OS for 30 years and it is unlikely to lose that position any time soon.

It's really refreshing and heartening to see the criticism on Microsoft in the comments there on ars.

I work in a typical MS shop and as usual their evangelism is really strong. Everyone in the admin team is a hardcore Microsoft promoter, everywhere from internally on Yammer and externally on socials. They're probably fishing to get made MVP. But still, I have more self-respect. While they're all eagerly piling on Copilot studio I'm making my own bots with ollama. I don't like having my knowledge and experience locked behind someone else's brand and interests.

I'm very critical and feel they are a mediocre company which mainly floats on being "just good enough to not pass over" because of their marketshare. The old "nobody got fired for buying IBM" thing. I don't think they're actually leaders in anything. They're just big so they're hard to get around. Every third party solution we've replaced with a MS alternative was more capable, more ethical and easier to use. It was always a step back to settle for the MS solution.

Now again with the whole Copilot war they can do nothing wrong in the eyes of my colleagues. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one seeing this.

Even if there's a "disable" button, I don't trust them to actually honor the disable button either.

I trust Microsoft to not send photos/videos of user activity back to home base. Seems like a lot of bandwidth.

What I imagine will happen is the Recall feature will send summaries of user activity back to Microsoft. That way, it's "anonymized" and somehow legal

For MS to even think Recall was a good idea is quite worrisome.

Financial services, government departments (including things like criminal cases), healthcare - talk about a privacy and confidentiality nightmare.

It should be interesting to hear the inside story about how this was championed inside the company and how it got the greenlight from the higher ups.

Microsoft seems unaware how much pr0n and other “objectionable” material its users peruse.

Related and mentioned within:

Recall: Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40540703

It is a privacy invasion scheme --- one that consumes both compute and storage bandwidth.

Beyond this, the only feature I will be looking for is how to disable it.

It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway.