Windows 11 Recall is Not a Privacy Concern

Sitting in the audience Monday as Microsoft unveiled a new Windows 11 feature called Recall, I instantly predicted the reaction we’re now seeing out in the world. But you can ignore the Chicken Littles on this one: Recall is an opt-in preview experience that will ship on only a tiny number of PCs this year.

And even if you do embrace Recall, everything it does happens only on-device and doesn’t sync in any way elsewhere. In fact, the issue I raised with the feature’s designer was that it was, if anything, too limited. For example, if you reset the PC on which you’re using Recall, you’ll lose any snapshots you made.

But we all knew this was coming, that privacy advocates would immediately stomp all over this functionality without taking the time to understand how it even works. To be fair, it doesn’t help that we’re still reeling from and dealing with very real privacy concerns related to AI and the data-stealing monsters in Big Tech that are pushing forward in that area without any regard whatsoever to ethics or the law. And that Microsoft, the maker of Recall, is in bed with the worst offender, OpenAI. Suspicion in some cases is warranted.

But not in this case.

A BBC report about Recall is a great example of how the press leans in too hard to appease both sides of a debate, allowing alarmist views to get equal billing with the rational. It’s full of alarming language—”a privacy nightmare,” “chilling effect,” “dystopian,” and so on—that drowns out the truths mentioned in the same article. All anyone will ever remember is that Microsoft is enabling a Big Brother feature in Windows 11 that will secretly follow your every action and, what? Report it all back to Microsoft? There are no legitimate concerns raised in that report.

You can learn how Recall works by, I don’t know, actually doing 10 seconds of research.

On the Microsoft Support site, for example, you can learn that Recall requires very specific PCs, limiting its availability, and how to use this feature. But that post only mentions that Recall adheres to Microsoft’s responsible AI principles, which is both laughable and vague.

But that’s OK. An article on Microsoft Learn provides more information, noting that Recall only works with supported web browsers (Chromium-based), supports policies so that organizations can simply disable it entirely, can’t save snapshots of InPrivate windows, blocked apps, and blocked websites, and supports many user-facing settings for filtering which apps and websites can be included in snapshots. Still vague.

If you are truly concerned about privacy, however, the Microsoft Support article Privacy and control over your Recall experience has the information you need. Here, we learn that you’ll be offered to enable this feature during Windows Setup and can say no. That you can disable saving snapshots, temporarily pause app filtering, and delete snapshots at any time. That everything Recall does happens locally on your Copilot+ PC, which is protected with full-disk encryption, the Pluton security processor, and, if you’re not an idiot, biometric authentication mechanisms that are further secured with Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-in Security (ESS), a requirement for this type of PC. And that other users who sign in to the PC, even with admin privileges, cannot access your snapshots. Everything that happens with Microsoft Recall on your Copilot+ PC stays on your Copilot+ PC.

So let’s turn our attention to the real problems with Windows 11. This isn’t one of them.