Improve your memory with Windows Recall

SINCE ITS ANNOUNCEMENT at Microsoft's Build conference in May 2024, Recall has had a torrid time.

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YOU'LL NEED

THIS A COPILOT+ PC Nothing to hide

Not only has it been criticized as being a privacy-busting nightmare, but at the time of writing, it's restricted to the Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, of which there aren't many. It was removed from Windows 11's preview versions while Microsoft worked on it a bit more.

At the beginning of December, a Dev Channel version of Windows 11 24H2 appeared with Recall returned to its place in the System Tray. If you've managed to avoid all the Recall-based discourse, it's a system that takes constant snapshots of your PC's active app. These are literal, image-based snapshots; not the sort of snapshots associated with backup software. These are then stored, and AI is used to parse the text and images in them, which is catalogued, and you can then search within this catalog with natural-language text queries or by sliding back along a timeline to find something you were working on or searching for.

Problems with this are instantly visible. What about banking apps or other confidential information? Is the snapshot library encrypted? Can I turn this off? Does it have an effect on battery life? All good questions, and ones we'll do our best to address here. -IAN EVENDEN

1 TO THE DEV CHANNEL