I can’t imaging wanting the new Windows AI function, which collects screenshots of your desktop “every few seconds.”

Would you be comfortable installing an application that takes a screen photo “every few seconds” and saves them all in a month-long archive? That’s the main idea behind Recall, a new feature that Windows revealed last week.

Microsoft’s Copilot+ suite of AI technologies for laptops with Snapdragon X Series chipsets includes Recall. It continuously takes screenshots of your desktop to build a searchable and browseable history of (nearly) everything you’ve done on your computer; the amount of data it can save depends solely on how much disk space you dedicate to the function.

When you find a snapshot that includes what you’re searching for, Recall will analyze the image and bring up the webpage or file you were seeing at the time it was taken, assuming it functions as intended—which AI stuff frequently doesn’t.

I don’t think most of us have ever felt comfortable having Windows snap photographs of everything we do, but I’m sure most of us have thought something like, “Damn, what was that funny tweet I saw yesterday?” and hoped we could just ask our computer to recover it for us. Microsoft informs potential customers that this isn’t a ruse to convince them to consent to full surveillance, having foreseen that the feature might cause concern.

According to a FAQ, “Recall does not share these screenshots with other users, make them available for Microsoft to view, or use them for targeting advertisements.” The screenshots are saved locally. Additionally, Microsoft states that you may instruct Recall not to take screenshots of specific programs or websites and that it will not record Microsoft Edge InPrivate sessions or video that is protected by DRM (nice to know Netflix is safe, I guess).

Microsoft does concede, though, that sharing a computer without using different accounts would expose one person’s activity to another. I would also add that you would have left a very detailed log of your activity for the government to interpret if they were to find your laptop, say at a border crossing.

Though I don’t personally intend to cross any borders with politically sensitive content on my laptop—at least not anytime soon—I still find the concept objectionable. With Nvidia Shadowplay’s continuous minute-by-minute recording for its immediate replay feature, I hardly feel at ease. Who likes feeling as though they are being observed?

I may eventually forget that I ever opposed to the thought of having a comprehensive self-surveillance gadget added to the number of things monitoring me, in this pot of boiling water we find ourselves in. Rewind is already another such software available; it appears that this is a current trend.

Despite my occasional urge to come up with a humorous joke, I wonder whether I’m truly that forgetful that this will assist me because I scrolled past last week. Folder hierarchies, browser history, and bookmarks are already present.

Enhancing search appears to be one of the more rational uses of machine learning for consumers out of all of them—not in the sense of Google’s latest AI responses, which are advising people to drink urine, but rather in the sense that Recall allows you to search picture contents using natural language.

Perhaps it’s one of those things where you don’t know you want something until you get it. Do you believe keeping thousands of photos of everything you’ve done recently on your PC is a good idea or a bad idea? Is it simply naive to be concerned about a few local picture files when internet services are already monitoring our every move with such precision and power? Shall we first attempt a more conventional memory aid? Ginkgo biloba tea in a cup?

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