Microsoft is testing a new Edge feature that captures screenshots of everything

Does anyone else feel tired of their tools being spying om them? Maybe I grew up comfortably, but I remember when the idea of huge corporations and everyone im between knowing every detail of pir life was either incredible (not realistic) or an abominable concept. Today feels like there's a magnifying glass shoved into every crack of life. And it's "normal". Maybe I shouldn't have read 1984 in school.

ISTR someone who worked at a US defense contractor, who commented on HN to say that you could always tell when Corporate IT was spying on your desktop, because it froze a little bit at a time, they were taking a series of screenshots.

So I have to wonder, Edge folks, Edgertons, Edgy McEdgefaces, does this hinder Edge's performance by a bit? Surely the disk I/O will get you if the graphics dump doesn't.

We’re truly in the endgame it seems, large corporates grabbing every piece of data they can swallow while regulators sleep. And forget about turning shit like this off when Web Integrity is the game.

The implication is total surveillance through multimodal LLM, click the wrong reddit link and the classifiers report you for CSAM or terrorism before you can close your browser in horror.

[ The offline reading "experience" doesn't seem to be part of the new screenshot-saving feature, though. When there's no internet connection available, trying to open a site with a saved screenshot simply returns a "no connection" error page. Microsoft doesn't even explain how and where screenshots are saved, if they're encrypted, or if they are being "synchronized" on the cloud for easier portability. ]

[ And then there's the privacy issue: a feature designed to take a snapshot of every single visited web page wouldn't be the most desired addition for people interested in keeping their browsing habits private. A saved screenshot could include usernames, passwords, or other kinds of potentially sensitive information. Microsoft doesn't provide any clue about how Edge will behave in these situations. ]

Doesn't Microsoft understand that people don't need any more reasons not to use Edge?

Given how many contracts we agree to online (including online orders and TOS) we need a browser plug-in that records the screen, saves it in a text-searchable form and makes it easy to figure out when I orders that LG TV and what the warranty was, even if the warranty was blurry text in an image.

If all the data was saved to our PC, and maybe to our Google Drive, I'd pay for that SaaS.

It should automatically record, but ditch the recording if it seems to be unimportant and if I do not tell it to keep the recording. That way, when I click "I agree" and instantly regret it, I have a record.

It should capture all the text hidden in scrolling text boxes.

Does anyone make something like this?

Sounds about right. Maybe this will be the magic trick that makes some IT security professionals reconsider giving Microsoft all their proprietary corporate data. Doubt it though, outlook somehow isn't seen as an exfiltration vector.

I've already made such a tool, and it works for any browser on Windows, and all the data is local -- yours. https://irchiver.com/

you may not enable it. windows update might keep turning it on though.

I imagine this is for training a multimodal transformer to retrieve previously viewed content and personalize generative conversational bots

I doubt they're doing this for users. Like everything else, they're doing it for Microsoft.

It's like they hire only socially inept sociopathic leadership.......