Microsoft unveiled its new Recall feature on Monday — alongside new Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 devices — and it’s designed to track and save your every move on your PC. Plus, it lets you to retrieve everything you’ve ever seen on your screen.
It’s reminiscent of that one Black Mirror episode, featured in the first season, called “The Entire History of You.” It’s about a fictitious, ultra-modern, sci-fi society where everyone wears an implant that records everything they do, see, and hear. In typical Black Mirror fashion, and without spoiling too much, the episode ends in chaos, making viewers reflect on whether such an invasive technology is worth it.
Recall, as it stands now, is nowhere near as bonkers as the “personal recorder” implant depicted in Black Mirror. It’s an innocuous feature built to be a helpful perk for Surface users. However, we can’t help but notice some parallels.
What is Recall?
Recall is like hitting CTRL + H or Command Y, but instead of just getting a history of your browser activity, you’re getting insight into everything you’ve ever seen on your Surface PC. How does it work? Windows 11 takes screenshots of your screen consistently before using the on-device generative AI model, and the NPU (internals that facilitate AI processing), to retrieve anything in your past with natural language.
Credit: Microsoft
For example, at the Surface event on May 20, Microsoft provided a use case in which a woman is shopping for a new dress online. She ended up liking a few options, but unfortunately, she didn’t bookmark them. “With Recall, I can just search for ‘blue dress,’ and it pulls together all the blue dresses I’ve seen,” said Microsoft’s Principal Product Manager for Windows AI Experiences Carolina Hernandez.
In other words, Recall can look back into one’s tracked history, find the screenshots that match your query (because it can recognize and identify objects), and feed them back to you with its search results.
Credit: Microsoft
Interestingly, everything you do on your Surface PC can be accessed via a scrollable timeline.
What about privacy?
The thought of your PC recording everything that you’re doing can be unnerving, which is why Microsoft got ahead of privacy and security concerns by stating that it’s aware that trust is important for many users. “We’ve built Recall with responsible AI principles and aligned it with our standards,” a Microsoft rep said. Plus, Microsoft claims that it will keep users’ Recall data private, local, and secure on one’s Surface device.
The Redmond-based tech giant also promised that it will not snag users’ data to train any AI models. Recall is only available with the aforementioned new Surface devices that Microsoft calls “Copilot+ PCs.”
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