[tedivm]

It's a system microsoft designed that took regular screenshots of what was happening on the desktop, stored them in a sqlite database, and then allowed people to ask their "AI" questions that would take into account literally everything they user has ever done on their computer.

People pointed out that this would record things like people watching porn, typing in banking credentials, viewing bills, filing taxes, etc etc. The thread of having these sqlite database leaked, combined with the amount of malware and randomware already out there, made a lot of security folks get very very concerned.

[simonw]

I didn't think Recall was about answering questions - there was no LLM component - so much as it was about being able to search your history, based on a combination of SQLite FTS against OCRd text plus CLIP-style embeddings-based semantic search against the content of those images.

[tedivm]

> Microsoft says Recall lets you find anything you've seen or done on your PC with a simple search query, and it's powered by state-of-the-art large language models, which can understand various content on your PC, like text, images, and videos. It works in any application, so you can search across your computer.

https://www.wired.com/story/everything-announced-microsoft-s...

[simonw]

Weird. I got the impression they were using embedding models (which I think of as LLM-adjacent) but not actual LLMs. See notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/5/ai-features-in-microsof...

[tedivm]

I haven't actually dug into it myself, so it could just be that marketers or journalists got mixed up somewhere.

[barbariangrunge]

That’s horrifying