Microsoft will try the data-scraping Windows Recall feature again in October

Enlarge / The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person’s PC usage. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published today to the company’s original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn’t elaborate further on specific changes it’s making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June.

For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the OCR text and the screenshots to a giant searchable database on your PC. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to help users retrace their steps and dig up information about things they had used their PCs to find or do in the past.

The problem was that other users on the same PC, or attackers with physical or remote access to your PC, could easily access, view, and export those screenshots and the OCR database since none of the information was encrypted at rest or protected in any substantive way.