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Windows 11 Recall in Controversy: AI Option Is a Cybersecurity Disaster

Microsoft is making Windows 11 remember and record everything you do with your computer. That will be the goal of Recall, the artificial intelligence feature that on paper seems as promising as it is disturbing. The introduction of PC Copilot+ with new AI chips —first with the Snapdragon X Elite, now with the AMD Ryzen AI 300— certainly raises interesting things in a market as established as that of PCs, but one of those novelties, the aforementioned Recall, has generated concern.

The truth is that this continuous collection of data has raised fears for the already weakened privacy of users. Microsoft has assured that it takes all kinds of measures to protect said privacy, but the discourse does not seem to have penetrated.

A cybersecurity expert named Kevin Beaumont has analyzed the potential vulnerabilities that Recall may have and has discovered some potential flaws that could compromise our data.

According to their analysis, Recall stores its data in a SQLite database in plain text, making it trivial for an attacker to use some form of malware to extract that data from the database and steal it.

Those screenshots that Recall takes are then run through optical character recognition (OCR) software that runs locally, and the result is, as we said, stored in that database. Although Microsoft assured in its announcement that a hacker could not steal that data, it is accessible from the AppData folder if you have an administrator account on that PC. Beaumont assures that even non-administrator users can access it.

To demonstrate the danger, Beaumont used Recall and then uploaded the resulting database to a website for anyone to search through. “Microsoft is deliberately going to set cybersecurity back a decade and endanger customers by giving more power to low-level criminals,” he says.

There are other worrying facts. Tom Warren, editor at The Verge, points out that the Windows 11 Recall feature is enabled by default on Copilot+ PCs when we turn them on for the first time and complete the installation of Windows 11.

There is an option called “Open Settings when I’m done setting up so I can manage my Recall preferences,” he explains, but the ideal would be to have the option turned off by default, and for users to turn it on if they want to use it.

Microsoft has assured us that the information is encrypted on our devices and does not leave them. Although there is no interaction with Microsoft servers to offer this option, encryption is not entirely effective. Not when, as Beaumont says, this type of encryption “only helps if someone comes to your house and physically steals your laptop, but that is not what cybercriminals do.”

The option has not yet officially landed on our PCs, but it will soon, and in fact it has already been discovered that it can be used not only on computers with the new AI chips, but also on other existing PCs. So, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft will correct these shortcomings and avoid these potential cybersecurity risks.

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