In part, this is what Microsoft Recall is about: scraping end users’ data at will to sort and feed to its LLMs, without the user ever seeing what is being scraped or having any real, lasting ability to shut Recall off and keep it shut down.
While I am aware that MS insists none of that is true, it is fact that 1) the snapshotted and OCR’d Recall data is now stored in an encrypted database that takes higher than average user skill to get into; 2) even users who turned off Recall saw it turned on again at the next Windows Update; and 3) even after MS said they were backing off Recall, MS continued to partner with hardware makers to create computers bundled with Windows 11 on top of the extra GPU necessary for processing all these Recall snapshots without making that sluggish Windows bloat even more sluggishly bloated than it already was.
So why all that money and effort, even as they claimed to be backing away from it, just to help a hypothetically forgetful user here and there? Data harvesting was always part of the payoff, why they were and are very willing to piss off a huge part of their own consumer base around the world by ending Windows 10 unnecessarily, and why even now they keep ramming Recall shit down the pipe when literally NO ONE wants it.
They get your data. At will. And as much of it as they like, without you ever having the opportunity to oversee what they’re getting, much less curate it. And after feeding it to their LLMs, they get to aggregate and broker it to their “partners” as well. Never forget what MS did in Palestine and the partners they can and will gladly work with, all based on massive collections of quietly gathered user data that either should not legally exist, or is not known outside of MS and its partners to exist at all.
In part, this is what Microsoft Recall is about: scraping end users’ data at will to sort and feed to its LLMs
That’s also what Google has always done. Want a large data set of emails? Look at our new free service, Gmail! Need a lot of images to train machine learning vision models? Check out our newest free backup tool, Google Photos! and so on. When they want one particular data type, they launch a free service that just so happens to collect this exact data type from millions of users.
In part, this is what Microsoft Recall is about: scraping end users’ data at will to sort and feed to its LLMs, without the user ever seeing what is being scraped or having any real, lasting ability to shut Recall off and keep it shut down.
While I am aware that MS insists none of that is true, it is fact that 1) the snapshotted and OCR’d Recall data is now stored in an encrypted database that takes higher than average user skill to get into; 2) even users who turned off Recall saw it turned on again at the next Windows Update; and 3) even after MS said they were backing off Recall, MS continued to partner with hardware makers to create computers bundled with Windows 11 on top of the extra GPU necessary for processing all these Recall snapshots without making that sluggish Windows bloat even more sluggishly bloated than it already was.
So why all that money and effort, even as they claimed to be backing away from it, just to help a hypothetically forgetful user here and there? Data harvesting was always part of the payoff, why they were and are very willing to piss off a huge part of their own consumer base around the world by ending Windows 10 unnecessarily, and why even now they keep ramming Recall shit down the pipe when literally NO ONE wants it.
They get your data. At will. And as much of it as they like, without you ever having the opportunity to oversee what they’re getting, much less curate it. And after feeding it to their LLMs, they get to aggregate and broker it to their “partners” as well. Never forget what MS did in Palestine and the partners they can and will gladly work with, all based on massive collections of quietly gathered user data that either should not legally exist, or is not known outside of MS and its partners to exist at all.
That’s also what Google has always done. Want a large data set of emails? Look at our new free service, Gmail! Need a lot of images to train machine learning vision models? Check out our newest free backup tool, Google Photos! and so on. When they want one particular data type, they launch a free service that just so happens to collect this exact data type from millions of users.
You know Microsoft isn’t about the user experience the moment they removed free games from their distro
Calling Windows a distro, while technically true, feels offensive