On May 20, Microsoft announced its new Recall feature. He did this during the presentation of the Copilot+ PC standard, and given the weight he gave it, it was more than evident that Redmond was very, very excited about what they called “photographic memory” within Windows 11. And it is indisputable, yes, that in the analysis focused exclusively on its functions, the idea was the most interesting.

The problem, since it took very little time to appear (not even 24 hours in fact), is that as originally proposed, The recall was a privacy and security nightmare. Both in terms of the information he could gather and the conditions under which he would do so, the prospect was simply terrifying. At that point, it was less than a week before the first investigations were launched, amid a firestorm of overwhelming requests for Microsoft to reformulate the feature and not enable it by default in the meantime. Windows 11.

Fortunately, and in response to the strong (and logical) controversy of Microsoft decided to back downfirst by not being activated by default, and shortly after by postponing its launch, which was originally planned on board Windows 11 24H2. Controversy, security and privacy issues, and, as we knew at the time, a lot of setbacks as well, were more than enough reasons for Microsoft to decide that there was still a lot of work to do before Recall was made available to the general public.

However, it was evident that they would not have it easy, especially considering that their main competitors already knew about their plans in this regard and, as we saw in the case of Google, they had already set to work. So things are Microsoft has just announced that it has updated the security and privacy architecture of Recallas we can read on the official Windows blog. Publications in which they acknowledge receipt of criticism and actions taken to resolve problems.

The most important change is that Recall will now be an optional featuremeaning that users will now have the option to enable or disable it during the initial configuration of the Copilot+ device. Thus, if not enabled, Recall will not capture or save any snapshots during install-upgrade, which was one of the main problems with the original approach. In addition, all images and related data they will be encrypted using the keys associated with the user via Windows Hello and will be stored in a secure environment called the VBS Enclave, designed to isolate sensitive data and protect it from unauthorized access, even by system administrators.

With these measures, Microsoft intends for the public to start trusting a tool that, as we said at the beginning, offers interesting possibilities, but was formulated disastrously. Something that, as we’ve noted on occasion, isrunderstand, and that is that Recall is not the creation of a startup with more enthusiasm than experience.