Microsoft’s embarrassing recall – The Verge

Last week, I revealed that Microsoft’s Windows engineers were scrambling to secure their controversial AI-powered Recall feature in time for its planned June 18 debut. Hours later, Microsoft announced that the feature that takes screenshots of almost everything you do on new Qualcomm-powered laptops is being restored.

Copilot Plus PCs shipped earlier this week without Recall, and Microsoft modified the setup process to remove it from Windows 11 – it’s now a feature “coming soon” to these devices. Recall still features prominently in Microsoft’s marketing materials, which suggests the company is confident it will return soon.

After developing Recall largely in secret, away from the usual public Windows Insider testing, Microsoft is now counting on this community of thousands of people to help test the new AI feature on new Copilot Plus devices. Recall will also be an optional feature with additional security improvements to address researchers’ concerns.

Microsoft first announced its Recall changes on June 7, less than two weeks before launch on new devices. This rush to fix Recall’s security issues always seemed like a big task, especially having to encrypt the database in time and implement Windows Hello authentication as well. I understand that Microsoft was working on some of these changes before the Recall concerns were raised by security researchers, but OEMs already had the final bits of Windows shipped on devices, which further complicated the situation.

The surprise decision not to ship Recall at launch occurred on Thursday, June 13, just five days before the launch of Copilot Plus PCs. Sources tell me that OEMs were informed of the delay before a public acknowledgment from Microsoft. But the security researcher Kevin Beaumont found out of the Recall announcement, forcing Microsoft to edit an earlier blog post in response to press inquiries.

I had planned to write about my time using Recall over the last few weeks, but since the feature has been delayed, I’ll wait and see what changes before writing my final impressions. In my limited testing with a previous version of Recall, I noticed that the feature was unable to correctly filter URLs from its capture method…