All of that data sent to a third party server is going to be public on the Internet at some point. Security? Don't make me laugh. Countries that required government IDs to participate online have already made this mistake and those IDs have been leaked. Just because it's open source or run by $NOT_MICROSOFT won't make it any safer.
The problem with other people consenting to it is that it makes every one else less safe. People get compromised and scammers can use that compromised data to work against people who didn't share their data with the, "Benevolent Open Source Recall Service."
This is correct - it was all on-device, with security guarantees that were instantly proven incorrect. Microsoft withdrew Recall, then brought it back with a newer, more secure implementation that was also proven insecure.
It also claimed that it wasn't going to record sensitive information but it did, to the point where some apps, like Signal, used available Windows APIs to set DRM flags on their windows so that Windows wouldn't capture those regions at all.
What Microsoft could have offered is an easy-to-implement API for application developers to opt into (but users can opt out of), and a blanket recall-esque toggle that users can apply to applications without explicit support. Applications like Firefox or Chrome could hook into the API to provide page content to the API along with more metadata than a simple screenshot could provide, while at the same time not providing that data when sensitive fields/data is on the page (and possibly providing ways for the HTML to define a 'secure' area that shouldn't be indexed or captured, useful in lots of other circumstances).
But, as with everything AI, they don't want users to want it; they want users to use it regardless of whether or not they want it. This is the same reason they forced Copilot into everyone's Office 365 plans and then upped the price unless you tried to cancel; they have to justify the billions they're spending and forcing the numbers to go up is the only way to do that.
I have to wonder what edge AI would look like on a laptop. Little super mini Nvidia Jetson? How much added cost? How much more weight for the second and third batteries? And the fourth and fifth batteries to be able to unplug for more than a few minutes?
They're called NPUs and all recent CPUs from Intel, AMD, or Apple have them. They're actually reasonably power efficient. All flagship smartphones have them, as well as several models down the line as well.
IIRC linux drivers are pretty far behind, because no one who works on linux stuff is particularly interested in running personal info like screenshots or mic captures through a model and uploading the telemetry. While in general I get annoyed when my drivers suck, in this particular case I don't care.
Conceptually a feature similar to Recall doesn't have to involve sending any data to third parties. It should not need to be a service just a piece of software running locally, doing OCR and full text search indexing using local compute.
Incidentally I often tell my friends I run an app on my phone that captures my location 24/7 and they would initially sound horrified. But then I tell them all my location data is not sent to anywhere on the Internet, and ask them specifically what is horrifying about it. There is none.
> I often tell my friends I run an app on my phone that captures my location 24/7 [...] But then I tell them all my location data is not sent to anywhere on the Internet
Your phone is on the Internet.
It takes only one attack (for instance, someone sends you an image which exploits an RCE on the image decoder and then chains into a privilege escalation exploit), or a careless mistake (like marking the wrong folder to be synchronized), or even an automatic update of the app (which adds a helpful "sync across your devices through the cloud" feature or similar), to have all that saved location data copied elsewhere.
You can't leak what you don't have; if you never saved your location history, there's no risk of it being leaked after the fact.
>if you never saved your location history, there's no risk of it being leaked after the fact
Very Buddhist in principle. I still prefer having my GPX tracks though, because they're useful to me, as well as notes, journals, logs... Local security is a separate question, and it's light years apart from stuff like Recall.
You wouldn't rather have only some of your location recorded? I don't understand the appeal of saving all data all the time.
It's akin to going to a concert and recording the whole thing, versus recording a small bit that feels memorable, so you can enjoy the rest of the experience fully present.
as a total aside, how do you know what they're going to pay at the concert before they start playing and you know it's your favorite song? Wouldn't you miss the beginning of the song?
It's a good total aside, my analogy was not great.
I went on Sunday, and she announced what she was playing. Otherwise from the initial notes it's easy to spot what's coming. Of course you end up with an imperfect recording, but it's good enough for the memories, I guess.
(I actually wanted to record the 10-minute jam session via Apple's Voice Memos but didn't notice it wasn't recording, because there's no feedback to when you press the button, and red-on-dark is easy to miss.)
Wasn't there a HN post a few weeks ago, describing how your phone's location can be tracked without anything installed and without leaving any trace on your phone? I think it was an exploit of CSS7 protocol used by networks?
The problem is that the data has to go somewhere. If you don't have the compute power locally, you have to send it to a server you control. At a point, this starts to break down because your attention to detail isn't sufficient to protect other operators. I think there are some happier mediums, but I wouldn't be as strident as saying there is no risk even if this is stored locally.
“I store all my location data and I see no problem because it's stored locally” is the new “I store all my passwords on a post-it and I see no problem about it”.
The more you store, the higher the risk, simple as that.
You have a convincing argument for not taking photos and not writing notes down. In fact, why write anything down? Remember everything like Socrates asked people to.
I use Arc which I've recommended on HN a few times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38662095 As a power user I find that it could be buggy but the developer behind it responds quickly on the forum. The developer also made another app with fewer features but FOSS: https://github.com/sobri909/ArcMini and it's been on my TODO list to use that as the basis to create my own location tracking app (I have some UI ideas for such an app in my mind).
The battery life impact is quite large. The iOS battery tool reports on the order of 5% to 10% but I think subjectively it feels much more than that. Getting GPS signals itself is IMO a bigger power draw than the app writing some time series data into a SQLite database (it defers expensive processing until the app enters the foreground).
> All of that data sent to a third party server is going to be public on the Internet at some point.
Windows Recall is on-device only (for now). The captures stay on device in a local sqlite database, and all the processing is done on device on the NPU.
I don't get the deal with requiring govt Ids. Back home the government has an OpenId provider and you could link your governmental account if you wanted without leaking your Id/DL/Passport which has data that's considered more private than your Id number.
All of that data sent to a third party server is going to be public on the Internet at some point. Security? Don't make me laugh. Countries that required government IDs to participate online have already made this mistake and those IDs have been leaked. Just because it's open source or run by $NOT_MICROSOFT won't make it any safer.
The problem with other people consenting to it is that it makes every one else less safe. People get compromised and scammers can use that compromised data to work against people who didn't share their data with the, "Benevolent Open Source Recall Service."