What do you need to know
- Microsoft plans to roll out a new AI feature called “Windows Recall” on new Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs this month.
- This feature remembers everything you’ve done on your computer and lets you find things using semantic search.
- Recall stores everything locally on the device, but the data doesn’t appear to be encrypted when the user is logged into the computer.
Microsoft has faced quite a bit of backlash over its new Windows Recall AI feature since it was first introduced on May 20th. The AI ​​tool, which will be available on new Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs later this month, is designed to capture everything you do on your PC and use AI to index that content into semantically searchable snapshots.
When the feature was revealed, Microsoft promised security. The data that Recall collects is stored on the device, “encrypted” with Bitlocker, and is never sent to Microsoft or advertisers. Users can turn off the Recall feature or, if they choose to use it, delete all images at any time.
However, it seems that all is not as it seems. While it’s true that Windows Recall doesn’t send any data to the cloud, the data it stores locally on your computer isn’t very secure. Security researcher Kevin Beaumount documented his findings about Windows Recall and revealed that the tool stores its data in plain text SQLite database.
This means that the data is readable and unencrypted when the user is logged into their computer. Data is encrypted only when the computer is not logged on. So while this protects against someone accessing your data on a stolen laptop, it doesn’t prevent potential malware designed to shred Recall data while the user is logged in.
Microsoft has done the bare minimum to protect this data. It is stored in the system directory, which requires administrative and system-level rights to access and modify. However, these protections are easily bypassed, and an attacker could easily write a bit of software to ignore these permissions if they wanted to.
Windows Central reached out to Microsoft for comment on these discoveries surrounding the Windows Recall, but the company did not respond in time for publication.
Aside from these security issues, Windows Recall seems to work exactly as promised. I’ve been using this feature for the past few days and it’s really impressive how well it works. It can find images and text using vague search phrases and I was amazed at how well it was able to do this.
Unfortunately, for users to really trust this tool, Microsoft will need to do some work to secure the data it collects locally on your computer. While it’s quite unlikely that you’ll ever encounter malware designed to scrape Windows Recall data, it’s not impossible, so it’s better to keep that data encrypted for peace of mind.
That being said, I find the outrage over this discovery somewhat exaggerated. All of your files are unencrypted when you use your computer, but most people don’t constantly worry about malware potentially scraping their personal documents, pictures, downloads, videos, and synced cloud folders.
While it doesn’t seem great that Microsoft built a tool into Windows that puts everything you do into a convenient directory for attackers to harvest, it’s important to note that Windows Recall is completely optional. You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to, and the service won’t run if you choose not to. If you’re concerned that it could potentially be secretly enabled in the background, Microsoft has built-in safeguards to prevent this from happening. If the Recall feature is capturing data, a permanent visual indicator will be placed on the dashboard to let you know.
Additionally, this feature is only available on new Copilot+ computers. It won’t come on existing Windows 11 installations, which may be reason enough for many not to upgrade their devices anytime soon.
Hopefully, Microsoft is able to update Windows Recall to encrypt the data it collects in the future.