Last week, I revealed that Microsoft's Windows engineers were scrambling to secure its controversial ai-powered Recall feature in time for its planned June 18 debut. Hours later, Microsoft announced that the feature that captures almost everything you do on new Qualcomm-powered laptops will be retired.
Copilot Plus PCs shipped earlier this week without a recall, and Microsoft modified the setup process to remove it from Windows 11; It is now a feature that is “coming soon” to these devices. The recall still features prominently in Microsoft's marketing materials, suggesting that the company is confident it will return very soon.
After developing Recall largely in secret, away from the usual public Windows Insider testing, Microsoft is now relying on that community of thousands to help test the new ai feature on the new Copilot Plus devices. Recovery will also be an optional feature with additional security improvements to address researchers' concerns.
Microsoft first announced its changes to Recall on June 7, less than two weeks before its release on new devices. That rush to fix Recall's security issues always seemed like a big task, especially having to encrypt the database in time and also implement Windows Hello authentication. I understand that Microsoft had been working on some of these changes before security researchers raised concerns about the recall, but OEMs already had the final bits of Windows shipped to devices, which further complicated the situation.
The surprise decision not to ship Recall at launch came on Thursday, June 13, just five days before the Copilot Plus PCs were about to ship. Sources tell me that the OEMs were informed of the delay before a public acknowledgment from Microsoft. But the security researcher x.com/GossiTheDog/status/1801379622187127265″>Kevin Beaumont found out of the recall announcement, forcing Microsoft to edit an earlier blog post in response to press inquiries.
I had planned to write about my time using Recall over the past few weeks, but since the feature has been delayed, I'll wait to see what changes before writing my final impressions. In my limited testing with an older version of Recall, I noticed that the function was unable to filter URLs correctly from its capture method…
