As the bad news increased, Microsoft had to take a step and announced that they would update the Recall feature.
First of all, what is Recall? Microsoft’s newly introduced artificial intelligence-focused Copilot+ PCs will offer Windows 11 One of the features of artificial intelligence “Recall” will be. “A photographic memory for everything you do on your computer.” The Recall feature, reported as, will allow people to search among the content they see on their PCs and take it back weeks. In summary, Recall is a very advanced history search system. excited many, but later Once the basic working logic of the feature was revealed, many criticisms and concerns began to be expressed. The basis of the Recall feature is that the system It constantly takes screenshots and saves them.. So, when this new feature is activated, it takes screenshots of everything you do on the computer. It processes them and puts them in the background. As no surprise, this situation did not please the users and it did not come to their mind regarding privacy. When other risks emerged, Microsoft took a step back.
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Today, the company first announced that the feature will not be activated built-in as previously planned. announced. So, those who want to use the feature will have to turn it on manually from the settings. In addition, to activate the feature, you need to use face, fingerprint or PIN-based protection. The use of Windows Hello system will be mandatory. It was also announced that additional data protection layers based on ESS will be added to the feature. Thus, screenshots taken for Recall will only be decrypted when the user authenticates.
Why was Recall a big risk in its old form? In its statement about the feature, Microsoft stated that the screenshots taken will remain directly on the computers and will be processed by the computers’ processors. Accordingly, the screenshots taken will not be sent to a server system, and help will be taken from the NPU unit in the processors carried by Copilot + PCs in the process. However, this does not mean that a 100 percent secure infrastructure has been established. For example, security researcher Kevin Beaumont, who worked at Microsoft for a short time in 2020, He discovered that Recall stores the content or data it analyzes with OCR technology in plain text after taking a screenshot.
“A screenshot is taken every few seconds. These are automatically passed through optical character detection by Azure AI running on your device and written to a SQLite database.” Beaumont said, “This database file keeps a plain text record of everything you view on your computer.He also gave the information. Stating that these files can be accessed by malicious people and “security disaster” Describing it as: Beaumont, in addition to the above, “Recall can enable hackers to automatically obtain everything you look at within seconds” said.
More bad news came today. It was previously stated that the content recorded by Recall required administrator privilege. Now, the collected content is being accessed by hackers. can be accessed without having administrative privileges discovered. It was previously said that in order to gain administrative privileges, hackers would have to create fake pop-up windows. The new discovery ended the need for this, making the process so eerily secret. Microsoft says it can be turned off from Windows 11 settings if desired. It did not receive a good response from Elon Musk with its new feature. Sharing a post on this subject, Musk said, “This is an episode of Black Mirror” and said that he would turn off this feature immediately when it comes out.