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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

“Can’t be uninstalled” and “not optional” aren’t the same thing.

This headline implies users won’t be able to prevent recall from taking screenshots of what they are doing. I don’t believe that’s true.

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I'd be more comfortable with it if MS didn't have a long and well documented history of overriding user settings via patches to turn on features that users had explicitly turned off.

If MS wanted people to trust them to honor settings, they shouldn't have ignored settings for decades.

Microsoft using updates as a means of reverting settings to Microsoft's preferences should be punishable by a per-instance fine.

settings are just preferences, and preferences change

everyone knows if you want to stop something from happening you use group policy

This isn’t even accurate anymore as I’ve had copilot reappear several times after using GP to disable it.

Literally what percentage of Windows users do you think know what a Group Policy is, let alone how to set one? 1%? 0.01%?

Home doesn't have group policy IIRC, and most non-business users are going to get that version.

define 'everyone'. (I learned something new today)

If I can remove it, I can trust that it won't get used behind my back. If I can only disable it, I can't have that trust.

>I don’t believe that’s true.

Indeed, from the article:

>Once shipped, Recall will also be something Windows users can disable but not entirely remove.

Sadly Microsoft has a history of enabling "features" after updates, even though the user has disabled it before. Of course only to "improve the experience".

That’s why I called out the headline - it’s a truth universally acknowledged (or should be) that most people won’t read beyond the headline.

>it’s a truth universally acknowledged (or should be) that most people won’t read beyond the headline.

Sure. That's why I put the relevant part in my comment for the people that skip the article.

AFAICT it's only going to work on Copilot+ branded systems anyway, and currently only the Snapdragon ARM machines have a beefy enough NPU to meet that criteria. Both Intel and AMD are working towards getting that certification with their upcoming CPUs though.

People should be already upset even if things planned now will start working as expected by Big corp in 5-10 years.

One can hope the AI hype train will have derailed in 5-10 years and Microsoft will have moved on to pushing some other nonsense that nobody actually wants.

> Microsoft will have moved on to pushing some other nonsense that nobody actually wants.

This is the one thing they're quite consistent about.

As of yesterday, the latest chips from AMD (stryx point) and Intel (lunar lake) are considered Copilot+ ready

You probably will be able to, and then it will magically turn itself back on after some updates.

agree. i don't recall MS saying that it could be uninstalled, only that it could be disabled.

This is the reason for the clarification.

> The latest preview update for Windows 11 version 24H2 contains a little surprise for those who don’t trust the software giant. It allows you to remove Recall, the coming AI-based timeline feature that will help Copilot+ PC users find things they did in the past.

https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/copilot-pc/307817/microsoft-...

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