Development of a feature like this surely started during the WFH craze, where managers could no longer casually walk behind people who had to have their monitors facing outwards. A market opened up, and this is not the only tool for this sort of corporate surveillance.
Certain Software Engineers will probably get some time without it by claiming they need Admin rights and that the system messes up their graphics or slows down their system or what have you.
See:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/ro...
Hint: They weren’t trusting. Corporate surveillance follows technology. The bosses are obsessed with watching their workers every second. This is nothing new. What’s new is that we now do most of our work on networked computers, cameras are vanishingly cheap, and data storage is abundant.
I actually want this feature. My memory is awful and I am constantly going to Chrome's History function.
This feature isn't bad, I just want it encrypted locally with no telemetry, which sadly I realize most tech companies love spamming their products these days.
In my times at the MS mothership I never met any managers or developers that were malicious or had bad intent. Sometimes they were overly profit-motivated, but the conversations were always "How much can we price this feature at?" not "How can I make a really evil feature that I can sell?"
Eventually we'll have programmers with Recall activated by company policy on their PCs, actively training the AI models that will replace their labor.
That has to be part of the goal here. The full automation of software development. Think about how much money Microsoft would make if they did it, and how much they would save if they implemented it.
We need a new Luddite movement to protect the workers from all of this.
I work in a massive data center. Manned by very few people. I often think about how many homes could be heated or cooled with the power used to prop up the internet.
It feels borderline criminal when there are homeless and hungry all over the world.