Windows Recall crawls back for round two in October

Microsoft’s seemingly forgotten Recall feature is still alive. In an update to a blog post originally authored in August, the company said that the controversial Recall feature will begin testing in October.

“With a commitment to delivering a trustworthy and secure Recall (preview) experience on Copilot+ PCs for customers, we’re sharing an update that Recall will be available to Windows Insiders starting in October.

As previously shared on June 13, we have adjusted our release approach to leverage the valuable expertise of our Windows Insider community prior to making Recall available for all Copilot+ PCs.

Security continues to be our top priority and when Recall is available for Windows Insiders in October we will publish a blog with more details.”

The update didn’t specify which Insider channel Recall would be tested in. Microsoft usually reserves its Canary and Dev channels for code that might ship but hasn’t been fully committed to, whereas the Beta and Release Preview channels represent firmer commitments.

The Recall controversy, revisited

Microsoft first announced Recall in May 2024 at a launch event right before the Microsoft Build developer conference. Recall was intended to be the flagship application of Copilot+ PCs, which would tap the NPU inside Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor.

Related: What are Copilot+ PCs? Explained

Recall’s premise appealed to me: a feature that takes periodic snapshots of what you see on your screen and reads those snapshots using OCR and AI, allowing you to search for snippets of information you’ve seen but can’t remember where or when or even in what app.

But privacy advocates panicked, thinking that Microsoft could archive private information in a way that could be accessible to hackers. (Recall can be turned off, Microsoft said.) Meanwhile, others were concerned with the vast amounts of storage needed to store all of that information.

Microsoft eventually pulled Recall from its initial release in the Windows 11 24H2 preview build for further testing. That testing will, according to Microsoft, take place sometime this fall.

Microsoft hasn’t yet said if any substantive changes will be made to the Recall feature or how it operates. Presumably, those details will be announced later in the blog post alluded to by Microsoft.

Further reading: All the ways Windows 11 collects your data