A double buzzword, nice. First of all, just because something is AI doesn't mean it's the antichrist. This so-called "AI" is just fancier math. All of the telemetry in Windows wasn't AI and that didn't change jackshit about what it did. There is no reason to bring it up as an important negative unless you have zero idea what those two letters are actually supposed to mean in this context.
Second of all, Windows, by default, has been keeping track of what you're doing locally for decades. I remember that the "recent files" list existed at least since Windows 2000, and Windows 10, by default, since 2015, kept track of all the programs you were running so that if you pressed Win+Tab you'd not only get the history of what you were opening, but also what you were using.
I do not recall (heh) anyone bitching about those two being evil spyware for all those years everyone was using Win10. Well, people were bitching that
all of Win10 was spyware, but those same people now bitch that Win10 was the last best Windows and will run LTSC IoT for as long as they can, even though it's still the same spyware they've rebelled against back in 2015.
Here's the thing about Recall: it wasn't some Machiavellian plan to harvest data on everything you're doing on your computer for Microsoft to sell. Microsoft already had all kinds of telemetry baked into Win10 for years that did similar user behavior tracking, and Microsoft could silently add even more nefarious trackers in the backend. But only when it was this combination of Windows 11 (bad) and AI (bad) is when everyone started shitting their pants.
But if you were to look at that initial implementation of Recall, and pay attention to how the tech companies operate since 2020, it would become very clear that Recall was just an investor appeasement project. Now, the more "AI" a company is, the more money they get from investors. This was the main push behind Windows 11 becoming a thing, first it's to refresh the dated Win10 UI, second is to use that refresh to then add a bunch of "AI" stuff so that investors see this flashy new OS with flashy new "AI" tools and invest into MS stock.
Why was Recall so insecure that it was saving all of those screenshots as unencrypted PNGs and kept all of the analyzed data in an unencrypted database? It's because Microsoft wanted to push it out as soon as possible just to show their investors that they're doing an AI thing. They could've taken care of making it properly secure, since after all, they do have the entire Windows Hello framework that isn't as half-assed as Recall, but they didn't care about it. They didn't even care about all the sites you browse, they already know all that shit and that wasn't the main intention behind Recall. It was always investor fluffing.
The bottom line is this: Microsoft invested way too much in their CoPilot+ AI branding to completely back out of Recall, but my hope is that they've improved it in one major way: it is as mandatory as Hyper-V. Meaning that it's a toggle in OptionalFeatures.exe that once unchecked, is gone from the OS. And from what I'm seeing, that's probably what they did, so it will be a non-issue to me. When it's gone, it's gone, and that's all I care about.
This whole "Recall is malice on Microsoft's side to spy on you" argument is bogus. Microsoft was always able to spy on you to this extent. Why did no one make a fuss about it? The same fucking reason everyone is now bitching about 11, but X years down the line will defend 11 as the "last best Windows" while demonizing 12. Happened with every Windows release, and every time people act like they're not mouthbreathing retards with the memory span of a goldfish and that they are rebelling against Microsoft and they're
totally gonna switch to Linux this time.
Seriously, the amount of parallels you could draw between the 2015 Windows 10 bitching and the current Windows 11 bitching juxtaposed with the current glazing of 10 is insane. People don't know jackshit about Windows, they just get outraged at news headlines with zero understanding of what's going on under the hood, then forget about it all once it's out of the news cycle. Same as it ever was.
