[arkohut]

Memos is a privacy-focused passive recording project. It can automatically record screen content, build intelligent indices, and provide a convenient web interface to retrieve historical records.

This project draws heavily from two other projects: one called Rewind and another called Windows Recall. However, unlike both of them, Memos allows you to have complete control over your data, avoiding the transfer of data to untrusted data centers.

[walterbell]

> avoiding the transfer of data to untrusted data centers

In short order, this will create a large corpus of unsecured local data.

Is the user expected to secure the data independently?

Do Recall/Rewind help the user to filter recorded data for retention or deletion?

[arkohut]

Rewind and Recall also store similar data locally but maybe not only locally. And Recall/Rewind allow data deletion, they can retain the most recent data based on time.

[patrickhogan1]

Rewind and Recall are 2 separate projects and 2 separate installers. I use Rewind and I have several outbound network monitoring apps as well as local disk monitoring apps. Rewind does not send data offsite.

Rewind does glitch sometimes specifically with audio recording which is extremely annoying. You go back to an area where you thought you had audio notes only to find you didn’t - even though you had audio recording turned on the whole time. It has something to do with meeting detection. Which is silly bc disk space is cheap just auto record. I do like the concept of an open source version and I will look into this.

[walterbell]

Thanks to PR debacle, Recall now encrypts the data in a VM, https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/wind...

[arkohut]

If this is very important, I suppose I will implement encryption for stored data in future versions.

However, I still have a question about this: it seems that lots of hard disk is already encrypted. After all, I also store a large amount of personal photos, documents, bills, and other important information on my computer, and I haven’t meticulously encrypted all this data again. Should I be doing that?

[pstoll]

It’s a question of risk.

Full disk encryption targets a different threat model - disk encryption protects against someone grabbing your computer.

Writing into an encrypted blob on disk adds a layer of protection against bad actors exfiltrating data by running code on the laptop.

Overall I really am amazed that this sort of thing is now possible and appreciate a privacy-aware / local compute and storage version of it!

[demarq]

This is odd. Why would you secure this piece of data and leave everything else open?

Surely you encrypt your disk rather than trying to secure this one app? I mean there’s far more valuable stuff to on your machine than anything this app could possibly store

[yencabulator]

Things that are fleetingly on-screen are not commonly stored on disk forever. That changes with these apps.

[alwayslikethis]

You can't have it both ways. You can either own your data and secure it yourself or you can entrust it to someone else and hope they don't leak it (they will). A lot of the data is already stored in your computer anyways, such as your browser history.

[627467]

"large corpus of unsecured unsecured local data" is this much worse than unencrypted outlook mailbox (pst or est)? Or offline files from your Dropbox/GDrive/etc? Or your browser profile?

I guess it's worse in the sense that it also records audio, but large corpus of information is already at risk on a unsecure or compromised devices

[arkohut]

I don’t record audio because I believe this is already a built-in feature in many meeting software applications.