thomasahle
an hour ago
For those who don't know, Microsoft Recall is a system that screenshots what you do every few seconds, and uses OpenAI's vision api to allow search on eveything you did in the past.
There's an article from Sep 27th where they promise you'll be able to uninstall Recall: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/27/24255721/microsoft-window... , not sure what that means for this explorer.exe dependency.
mitthrowaway2
44 minutes ago
Is this why a new privacy setting quietly turned up called "Activity history"?
> "Activity history: Jump back into what you were doing on your device by storing your activity history, including info about websites you browse and how you use apps and services. Review the Learn more and Privacy Statement to find out how Microsoft products and services use this data to personalize experiences while respecting your privacy"
"Copilot" also quietly turned up on my Windows 10 taskbar not long ago. I certainly didn't opt to install it.
benterix
15 minutes ago
Frankly I don't understand why anybody would be surprised over this. They have been doing this stuff for over a decade? (I specifically mean quietly introducing privacy-hostile settings without user consent or knowledge, not other user-hostile stuff that's been going on for much longer).
hbn
13 minutes ago
Copilot first appeared in my taskbar after an update as a pinned app, which I promptly I unpinned.
Another update not long after it appeared again in my taskbar, this time not as a pinned app icon, but it literally replaced my "show desktop" button in the bottom right corner! I had to search online for other confused people looking to restore a basic desktop navigation feature that's been around since like 2009, because they replaced it with the 17th ever-present option to jump into their preinstalled bloatware!
And just as a sidenote, Microsoft Copilot is by far the worst LLM I've tried to use, both in how dumb it is, but also in how infuriating it is when it gets stuff wrong while spamming a bunch of stupid emojis into every sentence like it's excited about how confidently stupid it is.
lostmsu
an hour ago
It supposed to be local.
kobalsky
an hour ago
~~it's supposed to be optional.~~
it's supposed to be local. <------ YOU ARE HERE
you can supposedly disable it.
it's supposed not to send your information to the cops if it's sees you being naughty.
whatshisface
an hour ago
Or maybe,
It's supposed to be local.
Broad, anonymized statistics are aggregated by Microsoft.
Including your name.
It's only available to Microsoft's marketing department.
It's available to third-party affiliates.
A handful of resellers are affiliated.
Insurance companies, employers and law enforcement have as much of a right to buy the information as anyone else.
umanwizard
an hour ago
There's another step:
"Okay, it'll send your information to the cops, but only if it sees you doing something REALLY, REALLY bad, and we pinky-promise we will not let cops in authoritarian countries decide what that means".
(Remember the iCloud photo scanning controversy?)
hagbard_c
40 minutes ago
And then, the last step:
If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to worry over.
Why do you worry? What do you have to hide?
Don't leave your house, a Black Maria is on its way to pick you up.
lostmsu
38 minutes ago
Did you mean "opt-in" rather than optional? Optional is the same as "you can disable it". Also, you scratched it out. Are you sure they just enable it without asking? The link above even has a screenshot.
skydhash
an hour ago
Which is equally bad. Why am I wasting CPU power on that?
goalieca
an hour ago
It sounds like an unnecessary security nightmare. Someone will figure out how to tap into this.
bboygravity
an hour ago
An OpenAI model running locally, not sending data to OpenAI? Similar to how llama3 can be run locally?
Yeah, you'll have to bring some sources for me to begin buying that. It goes totally against everything Microsoft and OpenAI have been pushing.
KTibow
a few seconds ago
What makes you say that it uses OpenAI models? From what I understand right now it only has search functionality, which could be easily done with a local embedding model (similar to the open-weights CLIP) and possibly OCR.
mistermann
an hour ago
It is plausible MS is taking marching orders from a higher power, off the record.
hypeatei
37 minutes ago
No, that scheme would be too hard to contain so the three letter agencies are blatant about it. They just let tech companies develop these things and know they'll have access to the data anyway.
For every real user that finds a tool slurping up data to be useful, there are 100 law enforcement agents also saying it's useful so everyone should hop on the bandwagon.