Microsoft Will Switch Off Recall by Default After Security Backlash

When Microsoft named its new Windows feature Recall, the company intended the word to refer to a kind of perfect, AI-enabled memory for your device. Today, the other, unintended definition of “recall”—a company's admission that a product is too dangerous or defective to be left on the market in its current form—seems more appropriate.

On Friday, Microsoft announced that it would be making multiple dramatic changes to its rollout of its Recall feature, making it an opt-in feature in the Copilot+ compatible versions of Windows where it had previously been turned on by default, and introducing new security measures designed to better keep data encrypted and require authentication to access Recall's stored data.

“We are updating the set-up experience of Copilot+ PCs to give people a clearer choice to opt-in to saving snapshots using Recall,” reads a blog post from Pavan Davuluri Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, Windows + Devices. “If you don’t proactively choose to turn it on, it will be off by default.”

The changes come amidst a mounting barrage of criticism from the security and privacy community, which has described Recall—which silently stores a screenshot of the user's activity every 5 seconds as fodder for AI analysis—as a gift to hackers: essentially unrequested, pre-installed spyware built into new Windows computers.

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