Microsoft Recall is capturing screenshots of sensitive information like credit card and social security numbers | Privacy nightmare is very real, and perfectly avoidable if you disable the feature for good

“Microsoft recalled Recall because of privacy outrage, er, concerns. It promised to improve its AI-based Windows surveillance feature before release, providing privacy safeguards and a more secure experience.

Now that it is here … the new feature takes screenshots of the desktop every few seconds, using the on-device large language model to scan, store, and process information.

Tom’s Hardware [tested](https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-recall-screenshots-credit-cards-and-social-security-numbers-even-with-the-sensitive-information-filter-enabled) the “improved” Recall feature and recommended that every Windows 11 user should disable the feature immediately.

While Recall includes a filter designed to avoid capturing screenshots with sensitive information, it doesn’t really work. There is no good reason for this to be an opt-out feature.”

Capturing screenshots has to be the dumbest way to collect information. Why not have the applications send the data directly to Recall via some kind of API? Then the application could be more in control of what is and isn’t captured to ensure that sensitive data stays sensitive.

It would also be useful to add extra data to recall which may or may not be visible on the screen. For instance, if I have an email open, not all the text of the email might actually be visible on the screen at the time Recall decides to take a screen shot. It would make much more sense, if the user actually wanted their emails in Recall, to just send the email contents directly to Recall so it could analyze it.

Same goes for a lot of other stuff. It would make more sense for Recall to just read Word documents directly rather than rely on screen shots to determine what’s actually in the document. Trying to rely on screen shots, it might be able to tell you that you worked on a word document that contained a certain subject, but wouldn’t be able to tell where the document actually existed on your system.

In short. Sending Info directly to the AI system would be much more secure because the application could ensure that sensitive information wasn’t shared, and the user could be more in control over what was captured from which applications. Also better quality information could be gathered and would ultimately be more useful.

I really hate how these companies push all this useless crap on us and Microsoft is terrible for it, they just want more data and are somehow trying to make us think this is helpful.

No thanks.

No idea why people are still using Microsoft products voluntarily between this kind of data harvesting shit and the constant ads.

And then they try to upsell an application to protect the very privacy they take from you.