Perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, Microsoft’s controversial Recall feature is once again in hot water. The service, which is designed to automatically capture screenshots of your Windows desktop on a Copilot+ PC, was supposedly patched to disable it from capturing screenshots of sensitive information like credit card numbers, passwords, and more, but a new report suggest otherwise.
Despite Microsoft claiming that Recall does everything on the device on which it’s operating, there have been concerns around just how easy it might be for bad actors to get ahold of the information catalogued by Recall. This has led the company to release several updates and even temporarily remove the service in order to ensure it won’t be able to capture that information.
But it seems those “fixes” weren’t enough, as a new report from The Register claims that Microsoft Recall’s sensitive information filtering is good, but not always good enough, and that it occasionally captures sensitive information anyway.
Growing cause for concern
This wasn’t quite an unforeseen consequence, especially since filtering isn’t always going to be a tried-and-true method for blocking out sensitive content. But it does raise some questions about whether or not Recall is good enough as it is right now. It is worth noting that in this experiment, the author of the report was trying to push Recall to see when it would fail to filter out sensitive content, and some of the instances in which it didn’t filter might be too much to ask of an AI system that’s still technically labeled as a “preview” by its creators.
But there were other times where the pages that the reporter used with Recall should clearly have been seen as credit card payment pages, just without the words like “payment” and “credit card” included. It could be argued that Recall doesn’t have to understand when a specific sequence of numbers is a credit card, but one could also argue it’s better for the system to assume so and refuse to capture potentially sensitive data.
Of course, Microsoft has already made plenty of changes to Recall, but there might be more work ahead to help address these concerns. For now, though, these issues highlight one of the problems with embracing AI solutions like Recall.
It might be best to avoid Recall
Despite the sensitive information filtering, the fact that Recall can’t seem to identify credit card information unless the words “payment” or “credit card” are present does raise some questions about the filtering system’s efficacy. Other attempts to play up the system required the author of the report to resort to putting information in plain text files, which Recall then captured. That’s also concerning, but again, we can only expect the AI to identify so much of what is and isn’t sensitive information.
Personally, I wouldn’t ever fully trust a system like Recall. Even with the sensitive information filtering, there are too many possibilities for it to mess up and give potential bad actors access to far too much information if they ever gain access to my computer. And while this report from The Register is concerning, to say the least, there’s a bit of an inherent risk that comes with embracing AI like this. And you have to determine if that’s a risk you’re willing to take for the benefits that Microsoft claims it brings to the table.
