Microsoft Recall has a rival

Even with it only just being recently announced, Microsoft Recall has a rival.

Recently, Microsoft unveiled a range of new computers sporting ARM cpu’s and integrated NPU (Neural processing units), which are basically dedicated processors for handling AI workloads. Alongside which, they announced their software they called Recall.

This software, takes screenshots of your computer every 15 seconds or so, uses the NPU to analyse and process each image, looking for searchable text and so on to generate a searchable index and it encrypts and stores it. The idea is that at any time you can search back through your usage history looking for things you did. The last time you visited a specific website, or what you were doing at a certain time. When the last time you entered credit card information (which won’t be excluded).

All this data will be stored by Microsoft on the users pc and in the the Microsoft cloud, but it will be encrypted and only available to the specific user supposedly.

Since it’s announcement it’s been called out by lots of users, as well as professionals and security firms as a privacy nightmare. So much so that Microsoft has back-pedaled a little and announced it won’t be forced (as originally announced) but will be opt-in. At least until a future update where it will silently get enabled without users knowledge (if past action from Microsoft is any indication).