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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

I think there's more to it than that. After a while, they say "We're going to send some of your information into the cloud to give you a better experience." Then a while after that, you have to click the button giving permission to send all your information to the cloud or you can't use Windows.

In spite of claims often made on this site that nobody understands or cares about privacy, people do care and understand when it's something this obvious and this extreme.

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Or at the very least, every other week when your computer forcibly updates itself as Windows likes to do, and you go through your 127th iteration of the onboarding process to your own computer that you've owned for 4 years, one of the new steps will be "Enable Copilot for an improved experience!" with a big "Enable" button and a tiny little piece of text that you wouldn't know was clickable for "More options" which spawns a button labeled "Leave off for now (not recommended)"

I don't know why you're being downvoted.

This is Microsoft's enshittification, which crossed a personal threshold for me -- "don't worry, everything's right where it was", but subtle nudges to accept further "opt-in"s that are hidden behind UI Dark Patterns.

I wonder if Satya is dancing right now...

I literally have to "set up my computer" like 10 times a year now every time there's a seemingly "big enough" update, and it's just carefully navigating menus trying to get me to sign up for Microsoft services and trick me into switching to Edge

A couple updates ago they put a bunch of new shit on my lock screen, like stocks and news articles or something, which I disabled immediately. And then the last update made my clock disappear which I can't even be arsed to figure out if that's a setting or a bug. Just do whatever you want with my computer at this point I guess, Microsoft. I just want to play a game.

I got tired of that shit years ago and switched to PS5 for gaming and Debian for everything else.

I do have a PS5 but I prefer purchasing games on Steam if I have the option since I know those games are practically guaranteed to be forward compatible long term. I’d love to ditch Windows though. I hope Valve continues to make progress with Linux gaming with the Steam Deck.

Does Recall work locally? If so, why would it send data to the cloud?

Because the whole point is to collect massive amounts of data to "train" their AI.

AI is the new Big Data, but instead of just wanting your basic information, where you moved your mouse, and how long you stayed on a page, they want all of it.

I doubt that. If you want a data hoover, look no further than chatGPT. People bring their data on a platter to it, private documents, drafts, personal problems, how to deal with government bureaucracy, anything actually. A diversity of people, they have more than 180M users, and if you assume a measly 10K tokens/user/month, that makes for 2 trillion tokens. And they are already language based, an alternation of AI text and human responses.

What can AI learn from human responses? They carry implicit feedback - did the user take the last response and build on it, or request a clarification, or pushed back? Did he try the idea and it didn't work? All that feedback served by the human helps the AI just as much as the AI helps the human.

chatGPT is a data blackhole. Every fine-tune can include new human preference data and new knowledge. Imagine the security implications if they fine-tune daily, learn a skill today, use it to assist someone else tomorrow. Maybe your nice idea will be implemented by someone else first!

Windows user accounts used to work locally. At some point during Windows 10's life it became a hassle to use a local account on a new computer. Now in Windows 11, short of modifying the ISO or using other unintuitive workarounds (some of which Microsoft has patched out), you are required to be connected to the Internet and use a Microsoft account when setting up your new computer (even for Windows 11 Pro!) If despite that you choose to work around that requirement, several features are disabled, including ones that enhance security!

Notably, you lose out on full-disk encryption on Windows 11 Home. On Home and Pro you lose out on facial recognition login (Windows Hello), which can be a useful tool for avoiding shoulder surfing attacks in public. But by using a Microsoft account, your computer's password can be reset remotely. There's no way (official or otherwise) to maximize security on Windows 11. Outside of Enterprise, there's not even an official manner to setup an air-gapped Windows 11 PC!

Until they received massive backlash, Microsoft planned on requiring Xbox One users to have a Kinect (camera, mic, and motion sensing device) connected at all times when the console is on, as well as connect to the Internet once a day to use the console. https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-xbox-one-wont-require-k...

To an extent the theoretical concerns that people are stating about Recall sound like paranoia, but the examples above show Microsoft has a bad history when it comes to privacy. Connecting Recall to the Internet sounds like a terrible idea, but so does restricting/limiting local accounts on Windows and (planning on) mandating that your home game console has a camera and mic connected and is connected to the Internet each day.

Unfortunately, they also have a bad history when it comes to security. Recent example: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/3/24119787/microsoft-cloud-e...

From the article, the US Department of Homeland Security claims that Microsoft has "a corporate culture that deprioritized enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management."

So while on the surface the concerns about Recall seem unreasonable, I think the fear is more understandable given Microsoft's many previously unthinkable actions, in addition to their poor security.

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