Microsoft delays its troubled AI-powered Recall feature yet again

Microsoft has again put the brakes on its AI-infused Recall feature. Designed to take snapshots of your screen activities in Windows, the feature was supposed to reach Windows Insiders this October. However, according to a statement shared with the Verge and ZDNET, it won’t surface until December.

“We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall,” Brandon LeBlanc, senior product manager of Windows, said in a statement sent to ZDNET. “To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we’re taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders. Originally planned for October, Recall will now be available for preview with Windows Insiders on Copilot Plus PCs by December.”

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Microsoft initially announced Recall this past May as an upcoming feature exclusively for Copilot+ PCs. Touted as a way to help you quickly find things you’ve done and seen on your computer, the notion just as quickly triggered a host of complaints from Windows users. Why?

Well, any feature that snoops around your PC taking snapshots of everything you do and see struck lots of people as a privacy violation. Security experts chiming in even called it a “privacy nightmare.”

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Responding to the criticism from users and experts alike, Microsoft has since been busy refining Recall and stalling its official debut. In June, the company put the feature on hold. Around this time, the company sent the entire codebase of Recall back to its developers for a major overhaul.

A month later, Microsoft changed its plans, revealing that it was shifting from Recall as a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs to a preview initially available in the Windows Insider Program sometime “in the coming weeks.” Those “coming weeks” eventually turned into October, which has now turned into December.

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Along the way, Microsoft has tried to smooth the rougher edges of Recall in a nod to the privacy and security fears. Rather than be on by default, the feature will be turned off and require users to opt in. Activating Recall and searching or viewing its content will require Windows Hello enrollment with biometric authentication or another secure method.

The database that holds the snapshots and the search index will be protected by “just in time” decryption. Windows users still concerned about their privacy can also completely uninstall the feature.

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But with the privacy fears, the continual delays, and constant tweaking by Microsoft, will Recall ever see the light of day, or was it doomed from the start? That remains to be seen. But at this point, Microsoft certainly has its work cut out if it expects Recall to be embraced by the Windows user community.