Microsoft

At a special event in Redmond this week, Microsoft announced Copilot+, its new AI PC initiative for laptops with NPUs that support 40 or more TOPS. With it comes a whole bunch of new features, one of which is called Recall.

Recall is a timeline of activity on your computer, but to make it even better, it uses AI to allow you to search for things that you’ve done. For example, you might be looking for an image, and all you remember is that your friend was wearing a red shirt and you were in the park. You can search for that because Copilot identifies what’s in the image.

Basically, Windows 11 is going to record what you do so you can easily find it later. It takes regular screenshots to get you back to apps that haven’t developed for Copilot+.

Some people aren’t happy

Taking regular screenshots of what you do sounds awful if you’re not paying attention

Somehow, recall has erupted into controversy, partly fueled by fellow living being Elon Musk. In a tweet, he called it “a Black Mirror episode”.

But even without Musk’s tweet, it’s likely that there would have been controversy anyway. People love to hate Microsoft, and they love a good chance to call it the bad guy. And CEO Satya Nadella just said Windows 11 is going to keep tabs on everything that you do.

All of these fears are unfounded

Not only is Microsoft not tracking you, but the video is misleading

Let’s get the big thing out of the way. Microsoft is not tracking you in any way with Recall, because your data isn’t being sent to it. All of this happens on-device, using the new NPUs found in Copilot+ laptops.

And yes, those are laptops that no one owns yet. You’re not going to get this feature on the PC you’re using to read this article. It’s not going to support it. It’s only going to be on new Copilot+ PCs with NPUs capable of a minimum of 40 TOPS.

Next, let’s address the idea that your PC is collecting your information without you knowing it, because this also isn’t true. Recall is opt-in when you go through the out-of-box experience. And remember, there are no existing PCs that will get it, so everyone gets the OOBE.

But the biggest thing I really want to note is that even before this was controversial, I heard from a bunch of people at Microsoft that they had already considered it. They did everything they could think of to give users as much control as possible. You can choose how much data is stored, pause it, block certain apps from recording, and even just delete your Recall by hitting a button. If there are further things that Microsoft hadn’t considered, I’m pretty confident that it would implement them.

Finally, the video going around is cleverly edited to leave out how much control users have. Like I said, it’s cool to hate on Microsoft and to pretend that it’s doing this incredibly controversial thing.

Recall comes from this fundamental idea that in 2024, it’s strange that it’s easier to search the internet than it is to search your computer. Microsoft wanted to change that, since the hardware has advanced to where we can start to do some really cool things.