The company has also warned Microsoft that if its “move fast and break things” ideology impacts the foundation of privacy-preserving apps like Signal, the app may drop support for Windows altogether in the future.
Ooo-hoo-hoo! Now that’s spicy. I like it.
That seems like a fairly credible threat.
Realistically, most of the users are on smartphones, so, they could do that without seriously hurting their user base, and they’re also not a for profit company obsessed with maximizing the growth of their user base
It’s so crazy they’re still trying to push this.
Like, even if the screenshots are stored locally, even if they’re encrypted, even if they get deleted after being scanned by the model, even if it’s turned off by default. Even if there is a DRM feature that supposed to keep it away from sensitive information. There will always be edge cases and exploits.
Any company that is handling sensitive information that they can’t legally save and/or share won’t be able to use windows if this is even an option to have on. Like, their business OS monopoly is going to get knee capped by this. To what end? To get training data for agents? For better advertising targeting? To force people to buy new computers, and thus new licenses, by obsoleting and ending support for older ones? It just doesn’t even make cold corporate sense.
I’d guess they’ll have an Opt-In for Enterprise editions?
Until Microsoft decides that enterprise customers should be using it and enable it by default with an update.
There are a lot of fuck-you-money level companies that wouldn’t have that.
Then the corpo lawyer teams say “This is a major legal liability” and say no
There will always be edge cases and exploits.
Sure, but most people already have sensitive data on their PCs and trust the OS to keep it (mostly) safe.
To what end?
To the end that stonk line go up.
The issue is that there are a lot of situations where a file can not legally be copied, saved or shared, and a screen shot by these systems would be considered that. It’s not that the files would be impossible to save or copy as is, but it’s not legal to, and having a system that might do it automatically without human input is a massive legal liability.
Even if companies in such a situation turn off recall on a system, there is no guarantee that microsoft won’t, at some point, push an update that activates recall on systems that had previously opted out of using it, or even reinstall it on systems that had physically removed the program from their system. Such as was done with programs like edge and Cortana.
Or an exploit is found that can turn it on.
It’s hard to believe anyone would be legally convicted of a crime because their OS took a screenshot.
issues around these kinds of legal liability situations are why so many companies hung on to systems like fax machines for so long. Or why so many banks still run on cobol.
If a company’s machine does something illegal, the company is liable for allowing the machine to be set up in a way that allowed it to happen.
“Your honor, I didn’t know the computer would do that” is not a viable legal defense.
Is there an Open Source alternative to this? I know ActivityWatch but I don’t think it supports screenshots and data extraction/summary of those.
