Microsoft's recall heralds the end of the personal computer
There is nothing more personal about a PC when Windows saves screenshots every few seconds. It doesn't matter if this happens locally, says Nico Ernst.
(Image: Denis Linine/Shutterstock.com)
Editor's daily routine: Last week, before Microsoft's latest AI initiative, I had read something about Google's plans. Or was it OpenAI's? And which website was that again? Since then, my browser history has counted a few hundred other entries, and I can't remember a single keyword. Google? I don't know what exactly I had on my screen, I just want to see it there again.
How convenient, you might think, that Windows will soon do this for me. According to a subsequent blog post about the new function called Recall, a screenshot of the screen will be saved every five seconds if the content changes. An AI is then supposed to process this locally, i.e. on the PC, not in the cloud, and make it searchable, including through text recognition. This turns the PC into a totalitarian surveillance machine. Sounds less practical, more dangerous.
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And also a strain on the hardware: at least 16 GB of RAM is required, a processor with eight threads, and with a 512 GB SSD, Recall wants up to 75 GB. So before the thing can shorten searches, it probably slows everything down first. Anyone who constantly monitors their PC using Task Manager and other tools can already see how the indexing of today's searches or Windows telemetry measurements regularly slow down the system. Recall will therefore initially only be available on Copilot+ PCs, which are specially designed for AI applications.
Want to bet this thing goes to the cloud?
It's only a matter of time before Microsoft offers to outsource indexing and AI recognition to servers for this reason alone - perhaps just as an excuse: store all screenshots and other data there, have it processed by powerful hardware and only deliver the results. Or as a service in the cloud, with a subscription of course. A kind of search engine for the entire company, for the activities of all employees. Perhaps, to stay with the example above, my colleague recently accessed the website I was looking for? At this point at the latest, it presumably becomes illegal.
The detailed monitoring of employees is prohibited by various regulations, not just the GDPR. Telecommunications secrecy and the Works Constitution Act are also affected by a system as intrusive as Microsoft's permanent screen recorder. This is probably why there are already instructions on how to deactivate Recall via group policy. In my opinion, such a system should not be used in a German company without at least a company agreement.
A dream for supervisors
In addition to this, let's try to use a common saying in the security scene: where there's a trough, there are pigs. There is a huge appetite for all of a person's activities on their computer. From employers and advertisers to law enforcement agencies. For the latter, recall is probably a wet dream. If efforts are made today to confiscate running and unlocked systems during raids following serious crimes, it will be much easier to secure evidence in future.
Even more serious is the fact that we are gradually becoming accustomed to the fact that the PC started as a "personal computer" no longer belongs to us. Of course, the term meant that instead of terminals and other technologies, every employee would no longer have a computer on or under their desk. However, with the spread of the PC in private households, it became a personal data storage device decades ago.
A semi-private device must remain
We have already become accustomed to being spied on on websites and in apps, to being constantly confronted with advertising and to our car telling on us to the insurance company. The PC, with a little manual work the last place of digital privacy, must not be completely monitored as well. If we also get used to this, it won't be long before the camera and microphone are constantly switched on because we may have said something useful, frowned in a meeting when the boss said something super important - the information may certainly be needed again at some point.
The same boss - I hope I didn't look funny - said in a meeting with the editorial team this morning that he would have loved to have been at the conference when Microsoft came up with the idea of Recall. Me too. Especially at the point where someone said: "Hey, let's save the screen content of every PC every 5 seconds." In a German company, at least the data protection officer would have thrown things at me.
(nie)
