I get your point, but Microsoft's Recall can capture anything onscreen - emails, personal info, porn, passwords and the like. And it feels, bizarrely for 2024, that little thought has gone into privacy or security.
I think the thought is proportional to the amount of thought a non-tech customer will put into it. Nobody seems to care about or understands privacy these days. Everyone knows they're being tracked everywhere they go physically and on the web. People use their real names, address, etc for every junk service they sign up for, without seeing any reason not to. If you tell people that their TV is tracking and taking screenshots of what they watch [1], they say "yeah, Netflix knows too".
It's literally, "how it's always been" for any non tech person under 30.
[1] https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/12/12/your-smart-tv-knows...
Part of me wonders if this is the consequence of how accessible tech has become, and the prevalence of increasingly non-technical product managers. I'm a former PM, and I'm not here to denigrate the PM role, but the fact that a product like Recall got shipped says a lot about the makeup of the product org that shipped it.
While I get that younger people tend to see privacy differently, I'd argue this isn't really a privacy issue, it's a security conversation, albeit with obvious privacy implications. Leaking what apps I use or what sites I visit is mostly a privacy issue. Leaking what I type into the boxes on those sites is a security issue. If the end result of leaking this info is the attacker can pwn all of my bank accounts, we're solidly into security territory.
The fact that this got shipped means that multiple levels of leadership either didn't think about the consequences or didn't care about the consequences. I hope it's the former, because that means they can learn from the backlash and hopefully recalibrate.
Microsoft is in a position of power that IMO requires a significant duty of care and responsibility to their customers, and lapses like this need to be judged through that lens, i.e. it is their entire business to make sure features like this are safe.
There was probably from lower decks, where they are closer to reality. However, people are scared for their jobs in this economy and likely didn’t take it farther.
Emphasis on "part." I'm totally guessing on this, but I think OP may have been talking about PMs where the MBA is their only notable feature rather than those where the MBA is just one part of a well balanced whole.
> You can teach a tech person to understand business, vision, strategy, finance, etc. You cannot teach very well the business person who has all that the intricacies of technology.
I'm inclined to agree with this. The thing about business degrees is that they are so minimal effort that actually understanding business isn't a prerequisite to being awarded one. I would know, I have 2 of them.
There's no guarantee a "business person" actually learned business, much less that they are capable of learning tech. Don't get me wrong, I'm not by any means implying that all business people are inept or that they are collectively unable to learn tech; it's often unrealistic, but not impossible.
When going to school for tech, such as an MS in engineering, CS, etc., typically requires enough effort that one will end up learning their respective field (I have met exceptions to this and interacting with them is infuriating) whereas going to school for an MBA is one of the easiest ways I know of to get government financing for a decade of partying.
Well this wasn't in the brochure. Best look into it!
Microsoft is just tripping over themselves right now bringing AI to market because they don't want to miss the boat. Their copilot for office 365 stuff is hardly working, it's real beta quality. No normal company would have released it to market in this state. But they're just terrified that Google will eat their lunch.
I don't think security and privacy concerns are much on the radar there anymore. They just want to establish their name in this new market at all costs. And I think in their eyes it makes sense, they've always succeeded because they had the biggest installed base, not because they were the best. It makes sense they see value in being first mover at all costs.
It's just a bit frustrating as a customer. As usual with something they launch it's more promise than substance. I have to say that usually they do have the follow-through to really make it a success. But it does take time.
That sounds good to some people. But if I mentioned it to most people in my family they would probably be rather weirded out by it. They probably also would have no idea of the scope of the size of it and how it is being used against them.
Privacy is not a binary concept. There are actions and information that some people are ok being public, and there are some they prefer to remain private.
What is not OK is spying and exploitation. I should know what data you’re collecting and preferably specify which I’m ok with. I also should know what is intended for and preferably for most of it to be anonymized.
Most people expect reasonable privacy policies from companies and they believe that there’s some regulation in place.
Absolutely, but if you ask/inform these people they will say "Well, guess I have nothing to hide." because they can't comprehend going without all their devices/services.
Many here may be too young to remember when many consumer products came with a "product registration" card. This was basically a postcard that asked for all sorts of information, such as your name, address, phone number, birthdate, sex, SSN, marital status, annual income, interests, other products owned, whether you own or rent your home, etc.
People willingly filled these out and sent them in. All the info went into databases that were merged with other sources and traded around various marketing agencies on 9-track tape reels. Advertisers could get mailing lists segmented by age, sex, income level, geographical region or specific zip codes, etc. for their campaigns.
It's all much more pervasive and invisible now, but it's basically what has always been done.
I don't know, I don't think sending in product registration cards could/would often result in your bank account being drained...
> It's all much more pervasive and invisible now, but it's basically what has always been done.
So you admit it is far worse today than it was before? But the second half of your sentence seeks to disingenuously pretend that it has "always" been bad.
I can be sick with a cold or I can have stage-four brain cancer. People have "always" been sick but one is serious (terminal cancer) one is not (a non persistent cold).
Basically is doing a lot of work here, the level and degree of how much data is vacuumed, processed, and used for targeting nowadays is orders of magnitude of difference from these primitive ways.
A tent and a house are basically the same: a shelter.
No, no. They thought about the privacy and security aspect. They decided that it's better for their bottom line if Windows users don't have privacy from the mother ship. Really, they already decided that way back when Windows Vista first came out and periodically asked Microsoft HQ if you should continue being allowed to use your computer.
Theyre just boiling the frog slowly. It'll be turned on by default soon enough and then theyll start looking for excuses to upload it.
This can be used to make them a shedload of money one day.
I was just remembering today what they did to the security/encryption as soon as they bought over Skype… they removed it. And who would that benefit - the spies.
No-one cared about that. No-one ever cares. Except for this rare occasion - tides are turning and people are starting to care a tad more.
I don’t have any friends that care about their own security and privacy. Wanna be my friend? Lol
In the case of the phone, one simply sees recipient of call, duration etc, regardless of how much information was exchanged. The phone I'm calling is arguably analogous to the server I request a page from, in the metadata context.
I'd argue browser history is significantly richer in some regards due to this. It's not unheard of for user identifiers to appear in URL paths either - try visiting https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=<HN user name>... In my Chrome, that's instantly in the history file with my username.
I don’t know anything about this system, but the fact that screen shots are not ultimately stored on the user’s PC doesn’t mean anything if the content has already been classified and indexed. It will be fished.
Of all the places on your computer that might contain porn images, that would be one of the very top candidates.
Unless, of course, you're willing to argue that a porn image stored on the local hard drive isn't contained in any folders on the same PC that soft-link it. You might have an interesting time trying to justify why it is contained in folders that hard-link it.
Sure, info about non-top-level links is extractable from e.g. request caches, but that's a different thing from the browser history SQLite DB.
Here is the URL of an image as it appears in your browser history: https://cheezburger.com/10357071872/if-i-fits-i-sits
See if you can figure out what image I was looking at.
Calling it the URL of an image seems to me like quite a bit of confusion about how web pages work.
(I really wish they followed the “standard” keyboard shortcut)
On a more relevant note, how can it know when a private browser window is open in anything other than Edge? Same question with the password manager - is there going to be some new API that apps have to "opt in" to to enable Windows to recognise them?