Controversial new AI won't save your credit card, Microsoft promises

Microsoft, responding to a barrage of criticism, appears to be admitting that its planned "Recall" AI search feature was designed to memorize a little too much of what Windows users are doing on their computers.

Recall is designed to save screenshots of Windows every few seconds so that users can later ask the AI to look up certain sites, texts or photos that were on their screen.

Microsoft is now announcing that Recall will not be able to record passwords or credit card numbers. Information from websites with health and financial data will also be filtered out, the company said on Friday.

Microsoft says Recall will make it easier to find information on a PC, since AI-powered software can analyse what is seen on the screenshots Windows saves and create a directory of what a user has been doing on their computer.

This could help, for example, if you can no longer remember the name of a travel website you visited, but still remember that it had palm trees and a beach.

Some AI security researchers said the feature would be a privacy disaster and warned that cyberattacks could potentially access Microsoft's archive of screen activity and see everything a person has ever looked at.

In response, Microsoft announced better security for the Recall data. In addition, the feature will no longer be switched on by default when setting up the PC; users will have to activate it themselves first.

The introduction of the feature, planned for mid-June, was also postponed to allow for further improvements. To give users more control over the information stored by Recall, users can delete individual screenshots, specific websites or time periods.

Microsoft and manufacturers of Windows computers launched a new PC category on the market in mid-June, which is intended to be more tailored to AI use. The device class is called Copilot+PC, in reference to Microsoft's AI assistant called Copilot.