Recall Not Quite Recalled
Image: Microsoft
Remember when we thought Microsoft might do the sensible thing and not release a tool that screenshots your every move like a nosy boss with a clipboard?
It doesn’t matter. They’ve backtracked on it, in one of the least surprising moves of 2025.
Paused Not Killed
You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft. When the backlash came last year over Recall they rushed to pause the rollout in 2024.
It wasn’t surprising that the press criticized their Orwellian “innovation” that took screenshots of customer’s computers every few seconds as they noticed the privacy implications of doing so.
The only surprising thing was they didn’t kill the project. They hit the snooze button and called it a “pause.”
Now, in true Microsoft fashion, they’ve tiptoed the feature back into public life hoping nobody would complain. They didn’t count on The Secret Developer.
It’s Back
Of course, Microsoft is rolling the feature to testers first.
The crack team of QA who approved Vista will make sure there are no issues with Recall, don’t you worry about that.
You won’t even have to have it on your machine. It’s opt-in now. It’s fine, because it’s local! Microsoft has you covered!
Because no Windows machine has ever been hacked. Oh wait.
Consent? Sure. But For Whom?
Privacy advocates are still rightfully unimpressed. Recall captures messages and emails from other people, who never opted in. Your boss sends you a confidential message? Too bad because it’s now part of your searchable recall archive.
Cheers, Clippy. Never change. Apart from this stuff about Recall, please change that. Because Microsoft just built the equivalent of a stalker scrapbook.
My Prediction?
If the idea of Recall seemed reckless in 2024, it now feels borderline negligent. Microsoft is bolting this privacy minefield onto their shiny new “AI PCs,” presumably to juice sales by pretending it’s something useful rather than something creepy.
The EU is already saying “not yet” for this misguided feature. In my experience when regulators are looking at your product things are not going to end up going good for you.
I wonder how many software developers at Microsoft are telling leadership this isn’t the best idea. Because if Microsoft actually listened to their developers, I think they would have had a much better business at this point.
Learnings
Let me recap what should be learned here:
Don’t build spyware into your OS. People don’t like it
Taking a lot of screenshots isn’t advanced AI
Listen to your devs
Maybe I’m wrong, and they’ll never learn from this. Perhaps Microsoft likes being the company everyone mistrusts. Maybe they think any press is good press, even if it comes with GDPR fines and a class-action lawsuit.
In Conclusion
Recall is like that bad idea you floated at 1 am in a Slack thread that somehow made it to production. It’s a bad idea and remains a bad idea. The optics are terrible, the privacy concerns are unfixable, and the only users who want it probably just want to snoop on their ex’s messages.
But sure, let’s relaunch it. What could possibly go wrong? I guess we should buckle up and find out.