New Windows AI feature records everything you've done on your PC | Hacker News Reader

New Windows AI feature records everything you've done on your PC

arstechnica.com

106 pointsquantisan50 comments

This is Microsoft collecting lots of data to shove into AI training while selling the data collection to users as a feature for their benefit.

Same as Google adding feature to android to warn you on live calls if they detect it's a scam call. Requires them collecting, uploading and analyzing the phone call live in process.

You are the product, and so is your data.

This comment is the product.

Most recently I experienced it with the slack LLM announcement with a lack of real opt-out. I've long since moved to federated services and minimized my footprint on centralized for-profit services and sites as a result.

Makes me wonder if there is (or should be created) a list of companies and their data offenses akin to layoffs.fyi

This is encrypted with local storage. How is this data being used to train and sell for them?

Except the user license agreement states Microsoft can upload/download anything, run anything, and ignore any user setting on “your” computer.

Can you link me to that? I’d like to read it.

https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/data-collection-Windows

Noting. The middle of the page: Note – Consumer users can’t turn off essential services.

And here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/essential-services...

Now ask yourself how can Microsoft get away with not allowing the user to turn off services? Because it’s in the EULA.

You have to navigate all the side links of this page https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/ and the separated privacy policy,

But here’s a good starting point in Paragraph 2.b It’s been modified slightly since I last captured this snippet:

[...] you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services [...]

This is a black box proprietary operating system. Called Windows. How do you know anything works according to specification, both intentionally and unintentionally?

You can at least analyze network traffic if you really want to know. If you care enough to do that though, I would think it would be much easier to just not use Windows.

Someone actually did that and it sends encrypted binary-like data to their servers.

Do they explicitly say that it's analyzed on device?

They stated that video and audio stays local, but what about text transcript from said audio and video?

https://openadapt.ai has similar functionality, except:

- it's open source

- it only records when you explicitly tell it to

- it has multiple PII/PHI scrubbing providers built in (see https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt?tab=readme-ov-file#...)

- the reason for recording is to automate tasks in desktop apps

- it's cross platform (Mac and Windows)

Full disclosure: I'm the primary author. Feedback welcome!

Why is anyone surprised? Everything you do recorded and you have no way to see or delete the data. Just like that company that ripped off the Beatles record company name has been doing for years.

I remember some post about video drivers recording screen captures for usage information product improvement etc.

I believe it was related to the forums for Nvidia clean install to remove driver telemetry.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/forums/nvcleanstall.91/

oh, yes, thier microsoft album was _so good_

This HN post from last month generated a lot of interest (525 points, 166 comments) and recommendations for similar tools:

I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40105371

I continue to believe that the essential challenge in AI is trust, not just capability.

Obviously if you can give an AI system lots of data about your life, it can learn ways to automate and improve it. But do we trust AI companies with that data? Not really, not now anyway.

Ultimately there may be a technical solution to this challenge, kind of like how E2E encryption addresses many trust concerns around messaging.

But if companies pursue capability without addressing trust, they might find a harder time in the marketplace than they expect.

Who asked for this? What problem does this solve?

Microsoft, who is likely collecting data from this feature somehow even if the raw video/images never leave the PC. I imagine law enforcement and three letter agencies love it too since now they'll just have to be able to access someone's windows account (MS will help them) to see everything a suspect ever done using their PC. They can even just chat with the AI about what it saw. That windows user had better hope it doesn't start hallucinating and invent a story about something that sounds criminal.

This is specifically something some coworkers and I were discussing the other day. Someone said, “I want to ask it where I read an article about (some topic) last week.” or “I remember seeing that when I was researching something else. I wish I’d saved the URL.”

So I’m on board, if just for browser use (as long as it exclude private browsing, of course).

FWIW, I've gotten in the habit of using Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/) with a browser extension to do this. If I read something that I think I might want to reference later, I just hit an extension button and it gets slurped into Zotero with a bunch of information indexed for retrieval later.

How much better is that than safari export-to-pdf and spotlight?

Different, not strictly better. Zotero saves a SingleFile html snapshot and will save the original URL and extracted metadata in its database, which is handy if you use Zotero anyway, but unnecessary if you just want to save text. Additionally you'd need to use Zotero to search it instead of Spotlight.

FWIW AnyBox also will save SingleFile archives and make them searchable to spotlight. Big fan.

My browser history seems to work fine for this.

Recording everything on the screen for this use case is completely absurd.

> So I’m on board, if just for browser use (as long as it exclude private browsing, of course).

Why not just use your browser history?

Needle in a haystack when you’ve opened and closed several hundred tabs and you’re trying to find some random fact you ran across a week or two ago.

https://www.browserparrot.com/

This is a feature I specifically do not want.

Maybe it'll help sift through the garbage pile of AI slop that AI will create, but the total recall results will partly hallucinated and be basically worthless. But it's AI, so much hype, very wow.

this is nothing, wait until it really kick-backs in, and distributors start getting payoffs to only offer AI chipped hardware with w11 factory loaded.

People have been asking for this since computers were invented. Dont act like just asking the computer and getting the needle from the haystack hasnt been chased since Kernighan wrote the first line of grep. The anti-genAI luddite nonsense has zero place on such a prestigious pro-technology platform.

Oh dear you were doing good up until the last sentence.

I mean, shit, I love seeing all the various AI advancements, but even I wouldn't want this crap built into my OS. At least not unless it's something I can self-host, and have full control over. My days of letting a corporation get it's data hooks into my personal information are long gone, as long as I have any say in the matter. I don't trust them, nor how absolutely drunk they are on shoving AI into every possible hole right now.

I'm pretty sure we warned you that capitalists were behind this. But no, you loved the shiny.

I'd say to flee to Linux, but Mozilla's already on the AI train. Computers are going to shit faster than we can react. Is this what the singularity feels like?

I'll just continue to laugh at every windows user... only harder. But I guess the technically illiterate managerial caste still will throw dumb money at the hype that the desktop monopolist has a lot of investment wasted in.

Yeah righto

Windows users will be Microsoft's lunch. I will warn whoever I know to avoid windows 11 at all costs. Whoever thinks this is a great idea, it's on them I guess.

This is concerning and a huge opportunity for Security thieves to learn what you did before they connected to your computer. Then make it easier to have async calls when you repeat the action they want to hack.

Ohh I see you bank at Bank of America, I'll create a script to reroute through my server and give me full access to your account instead.

> threaten the lives of journalists or perceived enemies of the state

Whew. You had me going there. Journalists or perceived enemies of the state won't be using Microsoft products, anyways.

It is getting more and more like the Matrix. Just that we are being harvested for our data (behavioural patterns), not the energy.

I can’t imagine they launch this feature without a way to disable it. Or if they are that crazy, I imagine someone will write some script that blocks it.

> I imagine someone will write some script that blocks it.

Why? We are not in such a position that we need to put up with antagonistic OS vendors. Workarounds are just making it worse by keeping technologists on Windows.

what can go wrong?

Anyone beginning to think that maybe owning a desktop/laptop PC doesn't make sense anymore?

You can use Linux to have a desktop/laptop PC that respects you r privacy.

Btw, this shit is likely to go into Android as well. Maybe iOS will stay clear for a bit longer...

i remember when we used to call this malware... :x

I quite liked the abandoned linux zeitgeist

basically rewind ai on mac

They are pivoting to limitless.ai, and evolving their product according to customer feedback. Creating sort of a meeting advisor for pre-meeting and post meeting quality. Action items leading in and action items coming out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com