Recall could be a big productivity boost for a lot of workers, helping them dig through all the information they’ve seen on their work PCs. If you also use Discord to chat while working, you could filter out Discord and ensure Recall doesn’t capture anything you say in there while it takes snapshots of all the Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Outlook emails you go through all day. And, as we’ve been saying, Recall offers a lot of control in general. If you don’t want Recall to capture a browsing session, you can use Private Browsing mode.
Even veteran Windows journalist Paul Thurrott, who is often critical of Microsoft’s privacy practices, has argued that Recall is not a privacy concern. It’s not uploading anything to Microsoft, as he notes — it’s just storing the data on your PC.
But aren’t there still privacy concerns?
While I can see the benefits of Recall — especially for productivity workers who go through a lot of information on their PCs and could save time if they had a faster way to find it — there are some elements of Recall that should give everyone pause. PCs have never captured and stored this kind of information in this way before. It’s a bit of a shock.
Still, Microsoft has made a lot of good changes after the criticism. Disabling Recall by default on business PCs, filtering private information out of snapshots, and requiring Windows Hello authentication to access snapshots are all smart shifts.
But people do have at least some reason to worry about Recall. An attacker with access to a PC could just enable Recall rather than install a keylogger, and then grab private information from the Recall snapshots. That kind of attack could be a little more subtle and difficult to spot than a full install-a-keylogger attack, too. It’s a good thing that this feature will be disabled by default on business PCs.
The most important answers lie ahead
More than anything, we’ll have to see how the risks shake out in the real world. When I first broached this subject, I suggested Microsoft do more filtering of private information and make efforts to protect Recall snapshots from people with access to a PC. Microsoft made those changes.
Perhaps Recall will make everyone realize the risk of giving other people access to their PCs — something that was always a risk when sensitive documents, emails, and browser histories are just a few clicks away.
Of course, Microsoft’s big Copilot+ PC push is about more than AI. The PC industry now finally has thin-and-light laptops with incredibly long battery life to compete with MacBooks. That’s huge.
Even if you disable Recall and turn off every AI-based feature on those new Copilot+ PCs, they’re a big battery life upgrade over your current laptop.
Interested in learning more? Watch this column and sign up for my free Windows Intelligence newsletter to keep up with all the latest intel. You’ll also get three new things to try every Friday and free copies of Paul Thurrott’s Windows Field Guides as a special welcome bonus.
