UK watchdog looking into Microsoft AI taking screenshots
UK watchdog looking into Microsoft AI taking screenshots
The ICO wants to know the safeguards around Recall, which can take screengrabs of your screen every few seconds.
I'm preaching to the choir here on Lemmy but I'm glad that I made the jump to Linux last year
If people say "I care about privacy" and are still on Windows/Mac, I question just how much they care.
Microsoft says Recall, which will store encrypted snapshots locally on your computer, is exclusive to its forthcoming Copilot+ PCs.
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OAs if that's going to last. First it's local, then it's uploaded as a "backup", then it's "secretly" decrypted (hey, they have your decryption keys stored on your online account), then it's silently added to the TOS/EULA, and finally it's publicly announced, years after the majority of training data has been scraped.
What is the stated reason for this proposed function?
This is the first I've heard of this terrible and invasive idea.
I haven't looked into this much, but I read in some article yesterday, that they're trying to establish these generative AI features as a selling point for Windows. In the article, there was a 10 second ad video for Recall linked, too.
And I imagine, this was somewhat of a hyperbole, but the article author claimed that Recall was the only of these generative AI feature ideas that was any good, but then torpedoed by the privacy issues.
So, yeah, that might be all there is to it. They want to shoehorn AI into there somehow, to make shareholder hype/value go up, and that was just the only real idea they had.
I don't know what specifically Microsoft is planning here, but in the past I've taken screenshots of my settings window and uploaded it to Copilot to ask it for help sorting out a problem. It was very useful for Copilot to be able to "see" what my settings were. Since the article describes a series of screenshots being taken over time it could perhaps be meant to provide context to an AI so that it knows what's been going on.
The phrase "privacy nightmare" gets thrown around a lot, but an online service taking pictures of your screen every few seconds does not sound worth the risk of exposure of personal information.
As for someone needing physical access to your device in order to access those screenshots, there's no way that's correct.
If they're locally stored on your machine, those screenshots can be accessed by an intruder.
Seems like a long walk for an extremely limited scope of benefit.
Drowning a baby in bathwater.
Hopefully they escalate it to our MPs, who certainly have plenty to worry about when it comes to not wanting others seeing what they're doing online and might actually do something to protect privacy for once.
afraid it might infringe on cctv