Windows Recall is secretly installed and enabled on non-Copilot+PCs (Privacy Nightmare)

Windows Recall today: Your data is private and stays on local machine.

Recall after 2 years: We may use your data to train our AI models, improve our services and personalize your experince.

Set up a new pc for someone today. Turned off all the OneDrive backup options. Rebooted and copied their files from a USB to SATA adapter. They turned the backup settings back on again!

Can't trust Microsoft.

"You can turn it off", "it's an optional feature", they didn't even last a year! What ever happened to slowly boiling the frog?

Permanently Deleted

(re)Ditched Windows on my PC a while ago, still have to use Windows at work. Just checked my work laptop running Windows 11 (standard laptop, not a "Copilot+PC") - sure enough, that Recall shit is installed and active. Disabled it, and made a post in our main company Teams channel with screenshots. Will be interesting to see if there are any reactions to this.

To find out if it is active in Windows 11, open up 'cmd' and use: (typing this from memory, hope it is correct)

dism /online /get-featureinfo /featurename:Recall

to disable it, you need a 'cmd' instance with admin rights:

dism /online /disable-feature /featurename:Recall

So wait, did I miss a step or is this NOT the recall feature they announced for Copilot Plus PCs? None of the screen snapshots, none of the AI search.

As far as I can tell it's some variation on the logging search that was in Windows in Win8, right? At least when it comes to user-facing functionality.

EDIT: As far as I can tell, people mentioning this mean the full Recall feature, but even though the package shows up on my Copilot+ PC the functionality itself is nowhere to be seen. I'm still confused about this and relatively convinced something is being missed somewhere.

Switched back to Linux this week and I couldn't be happier.

Wait! The only selling point of those "AI" PCs runs on non "AI" pcs?

Switching to linux few years back is really fucking printing...

I was spending so much time cleaning up windows and then microshit would roll my settings back🤡

For FUCK sakes....

I have a 256GB SATA SSD machine here, that I want to put a fresh install of windows on a 1TB M.2

And NOW is the fucking time windows puts out this fucking Win11 24H2 garbage... that's BSOD'ing peoples computers, having other issues, and now this.

Saw this bullshit coming, already got a linux mint dual boot setup on my work pc.

PSA: If you have a bigger usb formatted to the ntfs file system, consider switching it to exfat file system when working with linux. I had a hard freeze up and couldn’t get my files off for a bit, and this what I suspect was the issue.

I made this prediction before kind of joking, but I feel like it could still end up this way, where in the near future we’ll all be installing a FOSS AI after a fresh install whose sole job is to target the corpo AI’s on our local machines and continuously cripple them.

Keep in mind that this doesn't necessarily mean that recall itself is actually doing recall stuff or even running a process (I haven't checked if it does but not necessarily) like it would on a copilot laptop.

It is however very stupid that you can't uninstall recall without messing up the file Explorer. My guess is that it's a bug or some weird dependency needed with explorer.exe that handles the file explorer and a bunch of other stuff like the desktop and taskbar. It could also be spying but this seems like a stupidly obvious way to do it if they wanted too.

I've been running Pop!_OS with the Cinnamon desktop environment on my machine at home for the past 3 months. I'm very impressed with the out-of-the-box experience. All my games run in Steam or Lutris.

Fuck Microsoft.

FWIW I was worried this might be on W10 (hey, they might try it) so I tried the >dism commands found earlier in this thread (thanks btw!) & got “Feature name Recall is unknown”.

Safe for now

Even on Pro or Enterprise editions? I can't imagine businesses tolerating this never mind governments.

This is why win10 in a vm

I tried and couldn't find it on my system. I run Linux btw.

BOGU!

Why do people still use that legacy proprietary malware-ridden morally obsolete operating system?

Oh no! Anyways…