Windows Recall will no longer be enabled by default on Copilot Plus PCs – here’s what you need to know

Windows Recall has proven to be a highly controversial AI feature ever since it was first announced in May. What it does is it constantly takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC and then places the images into a searchable on-device database. And yes, that includes pictures displaying sensitive information. 

People were quick to call it a “security nightmare” after Microsoft openly admitted the software would not hide “passwords or financial account numbers.” The company attempted to defend its decision but has recently decided to make multiple safety improvements to Recall before its quickly approaching June 18 launch.

Arguably, the most important of these changes is that Recall will no longer be turned on by default upon activating your PC. According to a recent post on the Windows Experience Blog, the feature will instead be off by default, meaning you’ll have to enable it yourself during a computer’s setup process. 

Next, enrolling into Windows Hello is now a requirement to activate Recall and to view your screenshot timeline. This means you’ll have to authenticate yourself as the primary user through a biometric input or PIN before accessing the feature. 

Windows Recall's new setup page

(Image credit: Microsoft)

As for the final update, Microsoft is beefing up security by adding extra “layers of data protection [including] ‘just in time’ decryption” from Windows Hello ESS (Enhanced Sign-in Security). As a result, snapshots can only be viewed whenever a user proves their identity. Additionally, Recall’s search index database is now encrypted.

What's strange is this suggests the database that would’ve stored images containing bank account numbers was initially unprotected and vulnerable to outside forces. It may surprise you to hear how unsafe it was, but at least they’re fixing it before launch and not after.

Analysis: Remaining skeptical

The rest of the blog post reiterates the security functions of Windows Recall that were previously known. For example, snapshots will be stored locally on your computer and not uploaded to Microsoft servers. An icon representing the feature will sit in the system tray, “letting you know when Windows is saving” images. Plus, users can “pause, filter, [or] delete” snapshots whenever they want.

Microsoft also stresses that Recall will only be available on the upcoming Copilot Plus PCs since they have robust security to ensure privacy.

Does this mean we can totally trust Windows Recall to maintain data security? No, not really. 

Jake Williams, VP of R&D at the cybersecurity consultancy Hunter Strategy, told Wired he “still sees serious risks [as well as] unresolved privacy problems.” People could be hit with a subpoena forcing them to cough up PINs to gian access to Recall databases. 

Although Microsoft claims it can’t see snapshots, who’s to say the tech giant can’t change its mind a year or two down the line and decide to harvest all that sensitive information. They may find some legal loophole giving them carte blanche to do whatever they want with Recall data. It’s scary, though.

If you're looking for ways to improve your online security, check out TechRadar's massive list of the best privacy tools for 2024.

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ChatGPT steps up its plan to become your default voice assistant on Android

A recent ChatGPT beta is giving a select group of users the ability to turn the AI into their device’s new default voice assistant on Android.

This information comes from industry insider Mishaal Rahman on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) who posted a video of himself trying out the feature live. According to the post, users can add a shortcut to ChatGPT Assistant, as it’s referred to, directly into an Android’s Quick Settings panel. Tapping the ChatGPT entry on there causes a new UI overlay to appear on-screen, consisting of a plain white circle near the bottom of the display. From there, you verbally give it a prompt, and after several seconds, the assistant responds with an answer. 

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The clip shows it does take the AI some time to come up with a response – about 15 seconds. Throughout this time, the white circle will display a bubbling animation to indicate it’s generating a reply. When talking back, the animation turns more cloud-like. You can also interrupt ChatGPT at any time just by tapping the screen. Doing so causes the circle to turn black.

Setting up

The full onboarding process of the feature is unknown although 9To5Google claims in their report you will need to pick a voice when you launch it for the first time. If they like what they hear, they can stick with a particular voice or go back a step to exchange it with another. Previews of each voice can be found on OpenAI’s website too. They consist of three male and two female voices. Once all that is settled, the assistant will subsequently launch as normal with the white circle near the bottom.

To try out this update, you will need a subscription to ChatGPT Plus which costs $ 20 a month. Next, you install either ChatGPT for Android version 1.2024.017 or .018, whatever is available to you. Go to the Beta Features section in ChatGPT’s Settings menu and it should be there ready to be activated. As stated earlier, only a select group of people will gain access. It's not a guarantee.

Future default

Apparently, the assistant is present on earlier builds. 9ToGoogle states the patch is available on ChatGPT beta version 1.2024.010 with limited functionality. They claim the patch introduces the Quick Setting tile, but not the revamped UI.

Rahman in his post says no one can set ChatGPT as their default assistant at the moment. However, lines of code found in a ChatGPT patch from early January suggest this will be possible in the future. We reached out to OpenAI asking if there are plans to expand the beta’s availability. This story will be updated at a later time.

Be sure to check out TechRadar's list of the best ChatGPT extensions for Chrome that everyone should use. There are four in total.

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Fed up with Microsoft’s default apps bloating Windows 11? We’ve got some good news

Windows 11 is set to give you the option to remove more of its default apps if you wish to streamline the operating system a bit.

The ability to uninstall more of these so-called ‘inbox apps’ (or core applications) is present in the latest preview build (25931) which has been released in the Canary channel (Microsoft’s earliest test builds).

As of that build, you can now uninstall the default Photos app, People app, and Remote Desktop (MSTSC) client, as well as the Camera app (which you could already remove since preview builds in March, as The Verge, which spotted this, observes).

Furthermore, Cortana can now be dropped from Windows 11 following the official deprecation of the digital assistant, as we recently reported.

Cortana being swept away is part of preparing the ground for the arrival of the Windows Copilot AI – possibly later this year with the Windows 11 23H2 update – so that case is a little bit different.


Analysis: Expect more of this going forward

It’s useful to have the ability to trim away these default apps. Even though they aren’t huge in size, if you never use them, you can save a bit of storage space, and streamline your system in general. Also, you won’t have to look at pointless programs when scrolling through your lists of apps in Windows 11 menus.

It’s likely Microsoft will give users the choice to uninstall more of these core apps going forward, and you can already remove a fair few. Anything that isn’t system-critical should be fair game to be given the elbow in our book.

Build 25931 doesn’t do a huge amount elsewhere – it’s mainly about porting over features from the Dev channel – but there are some interesting tweaks, such as a change to Dynamic Lighting to allow you to match your Windows accent color with the RGB lights on the devices attached to your PC. Nifty.

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Microsoft admits Windows 11’s default apps system needs work – and changes are coming

Windows 11 is getting some fine-tuning around how default app selections are handled and how apps are pinned on the desktop, making these systems work better and with more overall consistency.

XDA Developers spotted that Microsoft wrote a blog post on its new ‘principled approach’ to these app behaviors, with the incoming changes set to arrive in testing (Dev channel) in the “coming months,” we’re told.

The first measure to be implemented is with app defaults. Windows 11 will get a new Settings deep link URI (uniform resource identifier), allowing developers to take users directly to the correct place in Settings whenever any given app flags itself up as wanting to be the default.

The default app is the software which is opened automatically for a specific file format, so for example, your default browser is the one used when you click a link in, say, an email.

Secondly, Microsoft is changing the way that pinning apps – putting icons permanently on the Start menu or taskbar – works, by introducing a new notification. In the case that an app wants to request being pinned, this notification will pop up explaining just that, allowing the user to either click Accept or Decline.

Crucially, the software giant wants consistency with these interface tweaks, so all third-party software, and Microsoft’s own core apps for Windows 11, work the same way and abide by these rules. That’s the plan, anyway, although whether things work out this neatly, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Windows 11 Pinning Prompt

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Analysis: Defending against dodginess, and making up for past mistakes

As made clear in its blog post, part of Microsoft’s aim with this tweaking of app behavior is defending against “unrequested modifications” from dodgy developers. In other words, things happening in the background unbeknownst to the user, and the likes of adware or other rogue software managing to infiltrate into the system.

It’s also designed, no doubt, to reassure Windows 11 users that Microsoft is putting the past well and truly behind it regarding the firm’s own policies on default apps, which have been a source of criticism previously.

You might remember that when Windows 11 first launched, Microsoft made it an unnecessarily clunky process to change browser defaults away from its own Edge product (you had to go through every file type and change the preference individually, such as HTML, PDF and so on – a ridiculous state of affairs, really).

That nonsense was canned a year ago now, but it still lives on in the memories of some folks (likely because of the many other ways Microsoft has tried to push Edge within Windows 11).

Indeed, Microsoft even mentions its browser specifically in the post, noting that: “We are committing that Microsoft Edge will release an update that adopts the new Settings deep link URI for defaults and public pinning APIs as they become available.”

At any rate, this is a welcome move, although in all honesty, app defaults should never have appeared in the state they were when Windows 11 was launched in the first place. Mind you, the same could be said about a number of things in the Windows 11 interface upon its release, with the OS having very much been a work in progress as Microsoft has gone along.

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