But this sort of tone-deaf move from Microsoft is irritating me. I already dislike Windows 11's UI and UX flow because it is so reminiscent of macOS; this is why I haven't updated to it on my personal main computer yet (which is running Windows 10 Education, courtesy of my alma mater's Azure subscription). I've seen rumours that Microsoft hired a bunch of UI designers who used nothing but macOS and decided it was a good idea to port macOS UI designs to Windows. What a terrible terrible thing. UI responses that are instant even on Windows 10 now have a jelly-like lag to them on Windows 11, for no good reason. Also consider the regression of the right-click context menu, the ads and Copilot everywhere, a preference for unlabelled icons over text, amongst many others.
As another comment says, Windows Recall appears to be an AI evolution of the already-present Windows Timeline feature. The privacy outcomes of this are concerning and I really really wish we didn't have 'AI' and 'Copilot' stuffed down our throats all the time. I would like to opt-in to features I want, rather than have them all pre-enabled. Some of them are very useful, like clipboard history with Windows-Ctrl-V; some less so and are flagrant privacy violations.
I have already disabled almost every tracking, phone-home and auto-update feature possible using group policies; this is just another thing to add to my list of disabled 'help' features.
That being said, if Recall doesn't phone home—which appears to be the case here—I don't buy the argument that 'it's stealing everything you do and hackers can access it if they have physical access'. I believe that the moment a computer's physical access record is compromised, the entire computer is compromised, regardless of security theatre like disk encryption in the form of BitLocker/LUKS, Secure Boot etc. It doesn't matter whether Recall is present or not.