Microsoft rolling Windows Recall back into Copilot+ PCs

After temporarily shelving its controversial Windows Recall feature amid a wave of backlash, Microsoft is back at it - now quietly slipping the screenshotting app into the Windows 11 Release Preview channel for Copilot+ PCs, signaling its near-readiness for general availability. In May last year, at its Build developer conference, Microsoft introduced Recall, a feature that silently takes screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and stashes them in a local database so you can later scrub through the footage to recall – get it? – what you were doing on your PC at a particular point in time. The functionality was set to grow to allow you to rummage through that database, using AI, to pull up specific actions based on search terms, as well as take snapshots of application activity, instant messages and other communications, websites viewed, keystrokes, and any other data available, so that it could all be, well, recalled using that AI-powered search. If you were doing something last week and couldn't quite remember the details, you could pull it up and replay it using Recall. At the time, Microsoft said the functionality would ship enabled by default on its upcoming Copilot+ PCs. The AI would run locally alongside the database, using the PC's hardware acceleration. The upside is that you can jump back to work or study you were doing days ago, which can be handy. The downside, one of them at least, is that your PC is now literally logging everything you're doing, so if someo...