Andrew Cunningham
The Recall tray icon is always visible when the service is running, just so you’re always aware of it. Sometimes it will show you snapshot previews here if you’ve opened the Recall app and unlocked it recently, but usually these previews are blurred because Windows Hello is protecting them.
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham
When anything is being filtered for any reason, the tray icon changes and you get a status message here, but Recall doesn’t tell you what is being filtered or why.
Andrew Cunningham
The Recall tray icon is always visible when the service is running, just so you’re always aware of it. Sometimes it will show you snapshot previews here if you’ve opened the Recall app and unlocked it recently, but usually these previews are blurred because Windows Hello is protecting them.
Andrew Cunningham
When anything is being filtered for any reason, the tray icon changes and you get a status message here, but Recall doesn’t tell you what is being filtered or why.
Andrew Cunningham
New to this version of Recall is an attempt at automated content filtering to address one of the major concerns about the original iteration of Recall—that it can capture and store sensitive information like credit card numbers and passwords. This filtering is based on the technology Microsoft uses for Microsoft Purview Information Protection, an enterprise feature used to tag sensitive information on business, healthcare, and government systems.
This automated content filtering is hit and miss. Recall wouldn’t take snapshots of a webpage with a visible credit card field, or my online banking site, or an image of my driver’s license, or a recent pay stub, or of the Bitwarden password manager while viewing credentials. But I managed to find edge cases in less than five minutes, and you’ll be able to find them, too; Recall saved snapshots showing a recent check, with the account holder’s name, address, and account and routing numbers visible, and others testing it have still caught it recording credit card information in some cases.
The automated filtering is still a big improvement from before, when it would capture this kind of information indiscriminately. But things will inevitably slip through, and the automated filtering won’t help at all with other kinds of data; Recall will take pictures of email and messaging apps without distinguishing between what’s sensitive (school information for my kid, emails about Microsoft’s own product embargoes) and what isn’t.
Recall can be removed entirely. If you take it out, it’s totally gone—the options to configure it won’t even appear in Settings anymore.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
The upshot is that if you capture months and months and gigabytes and gigabytes of Recall data on your PC, it’s inevitable that it will capture something you probably wouldn’t want to be preserved in an easily searchable database.
One issue is that there’s no easy way to check and confirm what Recall is and isn’t filtering without actually scrolling through the database and checking snapshots manually. The system tray status icon does change to display a small triangle and will show you a “some content is being filtered” status message when something is being filtered, but the system won’t tell you what it is; I have some kind of filtered app or browser tab open somewhere right now, and I have no idea which one it is because Windows won’t tell me. That any attempt at automated filtering is hit-and-miss should be expected, but more transparency would help instill trust and help users fine-tune their filtering settings.
