Microsoft's embarrassing recall – The Verge

Last week, I reported that Microsoft Windows engineers were working hard to get its controversial AI-powered Recall feature out in time for its June 18 launch. A few hours later, Microsoft announced that the feature that takes screenshots of nearly everything you do on new Qualcomm-powered laptops was being recalled.

Copilot Plus PCs shipped without a recall earlier this week, and Microsoft has since revised the setup process to remove it from Windows 11 — it's now a feature that's “coming soon” to these devices. The recall is still prominently featured in Microsoft's marketing materials, which suggests the company is confident it will be back very soon.

After developing Recall largely in secret, away from the usual Windows Insider public testing, Microsoft is now relying on a community of thousands of people to help test the new AI feature on the new Copilot Plus device. Recall will also be an opt-in feature with additional security improvements to address the researchers' concerns.

Microsoft first announced its changes to the recall on June 7, less than two weeks before the new devices were scheduled to ship. The rush to fix the recall's security problems always felt like a major challenge, especially encrypting the databases in time and implementing Windows Hello authentication. I imagine Microsoft was working on some of these changes before the recall concerns were raised by security researchers, but OEMs already had the final Windows bits shipped on the devices, further complicating the situation.

The surprising decision not to send out the recall at launch was made on Thursday, June 13, just five days before the Copilot Plus PCs were scheduled to ship. Sources told me OEMs were informed of the delay before public acknowledgement from Microsoft. But security researcher Kevin Beaumont got wind of the recall announcement, forcing Microsoft to edit a previous blog post in response to questions from the press.

I had planned to write about my time using Recall over the past few weeks, but since the feature has now been delayed, I'll wait to see what changes occur before writing my final impressions. In my limited testing with an early version of Recall, I noticed that the feature failed to correctly filter out URLs from its capture method…