One, a “sensitive content filtering” feature that attempts to “reduce passwords, national ID numbers, and credit card numbers from being stored in Recall” is new; it’s based on something called Microsoft Purview Information Protection that the company offers to its enterprise users.
Users settings for Recall. The automated filter for sensitive information is new, though most of the settings here were already in the original version of Recall.
Credit:
Microsoft
And while we’ll still need to see how the new Recall preview stands up to public scrutiny, Microsoft claims it has had the feature audited more thoroughly this time around: Microsoft’s internal Offensive Research and Security Engineering Team “has conducted months of design reviews and penetration testing on Recall,” and an unnamed third-party security vendor has also “perform[ed] an independent security design review and penetration test.”
The one thing Microsoft’s post doesn’t talk about is: why the Recall feature nearly launched in its original, unsecured form, why it didn’t go through the normal Windows Insider testing channels, and what (if any) internal changes are being made to keep this kind of thing from happening again. We asked Microsoft this question directly but haven’t received a response yet.
At around the same time as the initial Recall feature was imploding, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had just announced that employees were being told to “do security” when given the choice between launching something quickly or launching something that was secure. Whether this mandate can or will stand up against the company’s drive to get as many AI capabilities into all of its products as quickly as possible remains to be seen, but the Recall correction is a step in that direction.
Recall is still just for new PCs
Credit:
Microsoft
The Recall timeline.
Credit:
Microsoft
Recall won’t be available on the vast majority of Windows PCs—only those that meet the system requirements for the Copilot+ program will be eligible. Those requirements include 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
For now, that’s only Arm Windows PCs with a Snapdragon X Plus or X Elite chip in them, or x86 PCs with Intel’s Core Ultra 200V-series chips or AMD’s Ryzen AI 300-series chips. These are all chips made for laptops; no company has released a desktop processor that meets the requirements.
Microsoft didn’t give a specific timeline for when it would begin rolling Recall out again, but the company had previously announced that it would begin rolling out to Windows Insiders in October.
