Windows 11’s Most Controversial AI Feature Is Back, and It’ll Never Be Secure

After close to a full year—enough time that a SpongeBob SquarePants episode would fly the card “One Eternity Later”—Microsoft’s Recall feature for Copilot+ PCs are back, along with even more AI. Soon, everybody with a new Windows 11 laptop will have the opportunity to dive into Microsoft’s auto-screenshotting, “photographic memory” feature, or otherwise desperately try to delete it. If a feature that records everything on your screen doesn’t float your boat, Microsoft hopes an improved, “contextual” Windows Search function will actually offer a better OS experience.

Recall has been available to certain Windows Insider beta users for the last few months, but this will be the first time the feature will reach a general audience. In a blog post, Microsoft described everything that’s the same and different with this “opt-in” iteration of what it showed last May. The software automatically screenshots what you do on your PC. AI interprets those screenshots and allows users to search through them to find that one website or document you were working on but has since slipped your mind. Unlike its first iteration, the software now requires a Windows Hello biometric or PIN login for every time you want to access your screen grabs. Microsoft said these features will be rolling out to all users over the next month.

Microsoft has already detailed how users can disable or curtail Recall, though anybody logging into Windows 11 with the update should be able to enable or disable it on launch. What’s more, the company said you can completely remove it from your PC. You can further determine how much data the screenshots take up on your PC (a minimum of 25GB with 512GB or 1TB of storage). Recall users may also manually filter which websites won’t get screenshotted with any Chromium-based browser, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Opera.

If you still have no interest in Recall, Microsoft hopes you may be enticed by a few other AI features coming to Windows 11. The most pertinent for most users is a new “improved” Windows search. With the update, the Windows 11 taskbar or File Explorer search function should be much better at understanding what you’re looking for, even if you enter vague or conversational text. For example, if you search “mountains” into the desktop task bar, you should be able to pull up a slideshow of family photos from your files.

The other headline feature is Click to Do. It’s akin to the right-click on Mac with Apple Intelligence or Gemini on Chromebook, but the gist is by hitting the Windows Key+mouse click, it will let users access writing summaries or rewriting for text. If you use Click to Do on an image, you should be able to do a visual search on Bing, blur photo backgrounds, or erase objects in an image with a Magic Eraser-like tool through the Photos app, without needing to go to a separate app. This is different from the Copilot key that takes up keyboard space on most Copilot+ PCs. That key normally brings up the Copilot app for accessing Microsoft’s AI chatbot.

Those features may be useful to some, but they’re not exactly the thing that sells a new laptop as a true “AI PC.” Let’s recall when Microsoft recalled Recall just a month after the company revealed its auto-screenshotting feature at its 2024 Build developer conference. Security researchers quickly grew concerned that the software was capable of scraping sensitive info, like bank or social security numbers. It didn’t take long for experts to point out glaring holes in the software that let anybody with access to the PC read the AI’s screenshot logs, potentially revealing users’ activity, emails, passwords, and more.

Despite Microsoft’s efforts, Recall won’t ever be a fully secure system. As some security bloggers have noted in the weeks up to full release, if you send any sensitive info to a friend or loved one’s PC that’s also running Recall, that PC may also scrape it up. There’s a strong chance the AI will fail to avoid screenshotting your checking account number if you’re not working on any protected webpage or app. The feature will likely continue to be controversial, even if most users decline to use it.