Windows Recall is too risky for your Copilot+ PC. Turn it off, now

The world is just not safe enough for Windows Recall.

- MARK HACHMAN

Microsoft's controversial Windows Recall has now been generally released, and it poses as much of a risk to your privacy as it could be a boon to your productivity.

Recall is just one of several new features that either have arrived or will be arriving on Copilot+ PC, Microsoft said in late April. Recall, Windows' improved semantic search, Live Captions, Cocreator, and Restyle Image and Image Creator within Photos are now all available for Copilot+ PCs that include Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs as well as PCs with qualifying processors from AMD and Intel. A few features—Click to Do, Live Captions, and Voice Access—are available for Copilot+ PCs running on Snapdragon, but support for AMD and Intel chips isn't quite available.

For Microsoft, the release of these AI-powered features is cause for celebration, finally delivering on promises of an AI-powered world that the company first made a year ago. But in the months since Microsoft first announced Recall, a darker side of its potential has emerged. Now, Recall and its saved snapshots provide a record of information that could be used against you. Fortunately, Microsoft hasn't shied away from allowing you to remove Recall altogether, deleting these saved records entirely.

It’s also important to put Recall in perspective. Now, by default, Recall is opt-in, which means you'll have to explicitly enable it. But even if you want to use Recall, it’s only available to Copilot+ PCs, which are a tiny subset of the available PCs on the market. Just because Recall is available doesn’t mean that your PC will necessarily receive it. Even the most modern PCs, such as Intel's Core Ultra 200 series (Arrow Lake), don’t have the necessary NPU power to run Recall.

WHAT IS WINDOWS RECALL?