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A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel's back (www.windowscentral.com)

submitted 5 months ago by lemmee_in@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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It's a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a new AI tool designed to remember everything you do on Windows. The feature that we never asked and never wanted it.

Microsoft, has done a lot to degrade the Windows user experience over the last few years. Everything from obtrusive advertisements to full-screen popups, ignoring app defaults, forcing a Microsoft Account, and more have eroded the trust relationship between Windows users and Microsoft.

It's no surprise that users are already assuming that Microsoft will eventually end up collecting that data and using it to shape advertisements for you. That really would be a huge invasion of privacy, and people fully expect Microsoft to do it, and it's those bad Windows practices that have led people to this conclusion.

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[–] TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

A couple years ago it wasn't thoroughly and transparently sucking off every bit of personal data it could get, and gearing up to put adds on the desktop on top of that.

[–] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

When was that

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Seems the consensus is that telemetry started with Win7, but I swear I remember privacy people freaking out about Win95 or 98 sending system specs or something back with out telling the user. It's been a slow boil for a long time.

[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 months ago

Yeah I think 7 was when it was a big blip on the radar. But 100% they had to start laying that foundation beforehand, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was either always there or started making its way in 98.

95 was relatively groundbreaking and a part of me thinks the PC was so new they hadn’t thought of it yet or if it was even possible given the nature of internet, but you can’t put anything past the marketing guys that would probably love to know what colour your shit is.

[–] ninekeysdown@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes & No.

From what I remember from that time it wasn’t really a lot of people going on about privacy at that time. We were more concerned with how they just grabbed the BSD networking stack without saying anything about it.

There were a few things w/rt activation that people were pissed about. That was more towards the XP era though.

Though maybe someone else remembers it differently than I do since I wasn’t paying attention to privacy at that point and I don’t remember seeing anything about it in PCMAG or G4

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

I vaguely remember something from TechTV or Slashdot. Searches only turn up more recent discussions though. The old stories are getting buried by the more recent shit going on.