I would like to draw your attention to the discussions about the planned Windows Recall functionality.
Who remembers the movie Total Recall, which attracted many people to the cinemas in 1990? It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone, among others. And now comes the “sequel” with Windows Recall.
Windows Recall is intended to make user activity on Copilot+ PCs searchable. This will involve Windows saving snapshots of your screen at regular intervals. You can quickly search through your snapshots to find things on your Copilot+ PC. For example, content that you have seen in applications, websites, images and documents. Recall does not record audio data and does not store continuous video.
Further informationon privacy control and management.
Soon, a new class of devices with ARM CPUs and a special AI chip will be launched on the market that will support this function. A few resourceful minds have also found ways to run this function on non supported devices. The data that Recall generates ends up in the Windows user profile folder under AppData:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\CoreAIPlatform.00\UKP\{GUID}There is a subfolder with a GUID containing an SQLite3!! database and a subfolder called ImageStore, which contains the screenshots (JPEG format). The database and screenshots are accessible to all users who are in the administrators group, no encryption, nothing. A Python script is already available on GitHub that saves and analyzes the data contained in the database. This makes it easy to check via the command line whether a certain word appears in the data. All you need here is “creativity” to .....you know what could be made with it.
Let's see how this develops. There are already many reports and discussions on the well-known web portals.
Addendum: It is possible to access the data without administrator rights!
♂️
