The controversy surrounding Windows 11's newly-announced Recall continues. The UK data protection watchdog has already confirmed that it's "making inquiries" with Microsoft while billionaire SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has warned millions of followers on X to ditch the feature — all of this despite Recall not actually being available on any Windows 11 PCs yet.
Recall is one of several Artificial Intelligence (AI) features coming exclusively to Copilot+ PCs. These devices, which include the all-new Surface Laptop 7 from Microsoft, require a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to handle AI tasks. Samsung, Dell, and Asus amongst others have all pledged to launch Copilot+ PCs.
But ahead of the launch of the first batch of Copilot+ PCs on June 18, cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont has flagged a number of potential flaws in the Recall feature. Given that Beaumont used to work for Microsoft, he's well-placed to comment on this upcoming AI feature.
After a week of testing, Kevin Beaumont discovered that Recall stores data in a database in plain text. Without encryption, that could make it trivial for a hacker to extract data about everything you've been doing on your PC.
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