Inside the Copilot Recall ‘Disaster’ ⇥ doublepulsar.com
At a surface level, it [Recall] is great if you are a manager at a company with too much to do and too little time as you can instantly search what you were doing about a subject a month ago.
In practice, that audience’s needs are a very small (tiny, in fact) portion of Windows userbase — and frankly talking about screenshotting the things people in the real world, not executive world, is basically like punching customers in the face. The echo chamber effect inside Microsoft is real here, and oh boy… just oh boy. It’s a rare misfire, I think.
Via Eric Schwarz:
This fact that this feature is basically on by default and requires numerous steps to disable is going to create a lot of problems for people, especially those who click through every privacy/permission screen and fundamentally don’t know how their computer actually operates — I’ve counted way too many instances where I’ve had to help people find something and they have no idea where anything lives in their file system (mostly work off the Desktop or Downloads folders). How are they going to even grapple with this?
The problems with Recall remind me of the minor 2017 controversy around “brassiere” search results in Apple’s Photos app. Like Recall, it is entirely an on-device process with some security and privacy protections. In practice, automatically cataloguing all your photos which show a bra is kind of creepy, even if it is being done only with your own images on your own phone.