CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Windows Recall sounds like a privacy nightmare

Windows Recall sounds like a privacy nightmare – here’s why I’m worried.
Screenshotting everything you do and feeding it into an AI model could be a recipe for disaster

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Most Liked

faust

faust

it’s really crazy to think that someone thought this would be a good idea, and then convinced the whole company to put it in practice

jkdiaz

jkdiaz

Such a bad move/idea from Microsoft. Not sure what they were thinking.

Eiji

Eiji

In theory I have a legal copy of Windows 11 on USB drive that I have bought together with my PC. In practice I’m not using it at all. Because of performance and privacy mess it’s not worth to use it. When needed I just open an MS Office in a VM just for few minutes, but now I wonder what I would do. It’s too dangerous to launch Windows anymore. :no_entry_sign:

They have enabled it by default with a possibility to change it’s settings. How nice of them! On Gentoo I have just 1495 packages - if I would need to configure each one because BY DEFAULT they are dangerous for my personal and business data then I would consider changing job and not using PC at all as it’s easier to do. Now think that in theory Windows supports backwards compatibility which in practice does not work, but hey - they are another apps that were installed. I guess Windows therefore would have dozens if not hundreds of thousands of “packages”. That’s how Windows become another NO-GO zone. :-1:

I wonder how much craps Windows have that they “forgot to mention”. When using Linux I can at least verify what packages I’m installing and using. On Windows I have no idea what’s inside system files. Windows so far had lots of problems:

  1. Many useful features came after 20 years comparing to much better alternatives on other OS - that was an amazing source for memes :slight_smile:
  2. Tons of parts and services that slows down PC and not doing anything needed for a user’s use case were mixed with system making them hard to remove if it was even possible. The best example was IE that was not only browser, but was used as a part of the system and you was able to remove it partially or you could broke everything even if you not need it at all. :chart_with_downwards_trend:
  3. Other apps enabled by default that also affected privacy and performance. :male_detective:
  4. Backwards compatibility that worked best on … Linux using wine :man_facepalming:

This way for most people Windows become an OS only for games, but when literally one feature by default takes 10% of disc space it’s not worth anymore. Just think that a typical user knows and understands all the settings and performance tricks on Windows. They just want to “make it work” and with such practices as long as they would not use things that work only for Windows then it would be worth to change OS for a typical user. :thinking:

Why? Just think how much time takes typical Linux distribution installation … just a few minutes. How long is to work with Windows mess? For me it’s long hours. Maybe some companies would have a scripts to automatically disable/remove that and do hundreds of other things, but the question is … is it worth anymore? Learning about Linux that you have full control of with a descriptive error messages if something fails should be much easier than “somehow” solving Windows problems. Not sure how it’s working now, but I still remember errors with a weird hex code without any context. Since almost nobody remembers it people needs to Google each such problem. :mag:

You know what’s worst? Who would be really damaged? People who knows “a few things” that are willing to install OS on themselves. What’s a problem? A so-called “Gaming Editions” of Windows. Yeah, this OS is bad in terms of performance that many people are searching for a ways to fix it. :video_game:

Who cares if they would be viruses. My game would have more than few FPS!

You think I’m going too far and nobody would say that? I already heard things like:

They can spy as much as they want. I have nothing to hide!

Most of people don’t understand the security problems and just click Next. Windows really became a SCAM software just like the installers that “by default” added other apps or toolbars and had “somewhere” an option to prevent it. How did worked? Brilliantly - at least for IT service shops. They had tons of requests to remove 3 and more toolbars that covered significant space on their screens. :moneybag:

The funniest thing is that the often practice to fix many problems was a Windows reinstall and copy user data as that was faster and easier to automate than manually searching and fixing each problem. In worst case huge percent of people could be extremely vulnerable, breaking every NDA agreements, paying again and again for a reinstallation service. :crazy_face:

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: wolf4earth
It’s official. Your private communications can (and will) be spied on - European Digital Rights (EDRi). On 6 July, the European Parliame...
New
First poster: bot
SPWN is a programming language that compiles to Geometry Dash levels. What that means is that you can create levels by using not only the...
New
First poster: AstonJ
We engineered a wearable microphone jammer that is capable of disabling microphones in its user’s surroundings, including hidden micropho...
New
First poster: bot
Kinesis Advantage360 Ergonomic Keyboard. Split-adjustable, contoured design that maximizes comfort and boosts productivity. Mechanical s...
New
First poster: bot
MEMORANDUM FOR SENIOR PENTAGON LEADERSHIP COMMANDANT OF THE COAST GUARD COMMANDERS OF THE COMBATANT COMMANDS DEFENSE AGENCY AND DOD FIEL...
New
First poster: bot
Rewrite it in Rust by ridiculousfish · Pull Request #9512 · fish-shell/fish-shell. (Sorry for the meme; also this is obligatory.) I thi...
New
First poster: dani
The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry. Highly sought after, rarely provided.
New
First poster: bot
When Zig is safer and faster than Rust. There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I...
New
First poster: dyowee
Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?. There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five yea...
New
New

Other popular topics Top

Exadra37
I am thinking in building or buy a desktop computer for programing, both professionally and on my free time, and my choice of OS is Linux...
New
DevotionGeo
I know that -t flag is used along with -i flag for getting an interactive shell. But I cannot digest what the man page for docker run com...
New
New
AstonJ
Inspired by this post from @Carter, which languages, frameworks or other tech or tools do you think is killing it right now? :upside_down...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
“Finding the Boundaries” Hero’s Journey with Noel Rappin @noelrappin Even when you’re ultimately right about what the future ho...
New
Exadra37
Oh just spent so much time on this to discover now that RancherOS is in end of life but Rancher is refusing to mark the Github repo as su...
New
rustkas
Intensively researching Erlang books and additional resources on it, I have found that the topic of using Regular Expressions is either c...
New
New
First poster: bot
Large Language Models like ChatGPT say The Darnedest Things. The Errors They MakeWhy We Need to Document Them, and What We Have Decided ...
New
AnfaengerAlex
Hello, I’m a beginner in Android development and I’m facing an issue with my project setup. In my build.gradle.kts file, I have the foll...
New