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Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default

(brave.com)
290 points XzetaU8 | 3 comments | 23 Jul 25 09:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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LooseMarmoset ◴[23 Jul 25 11:21 UTC] No.44657920[source]▶
Who, exactly, is clamoring for Recall in the first place?

And who is to say that Microsoft will honor the toggle, “for analytic and performance metric” purposes?

EDIT: the rant above shouldn’t cast aspersions on Brave, good on them for trying.

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diggan ◴[23 Jul 25 11:27 UTC] No.44657957[source]▶
> Who, exactly, is clamoring for Recall in the first place?

I'm not clamoring for any Microsoft software for the last two decades, but the idea itself is interesting, like being able to catalog and look back at what I did at specific times in the past, or be able to query "What was the website where I saw X at?", would have been useful just last week for me when I was trying to find some document I read but didn't bookmark/download.

But I'd probably trust BP to not spill oil into our oceans again over Microsoft not having security/data leak issues.

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bryanrasmussen ◴[23 Jul 25 11:46 UTC] No.44658113[source]▶
if you use google then history.google.com

It is a totally worthwhile and useful bit of tech, unfortunately the scumbags have it and so you want to disable it because you don't want them to benefit even though they are giving you something useful in exchange.

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diggan ◴[23 Jul 25 11:53 UTC] No.44658178[source]▶
> if you use google then history.google.com

I use gmail from time to time, and YouTube, but literally everything else I do on the computer won't be visible there.

What would be cool would be to ask "What documents about ICs did I have open last night around 23:00?" and have it give me a list of local paths that I looked at, and it's all outside of browsers/Google. And of course, have it all be local.

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1. crtasm ◴[23 Jul 25 14:44 UTC] No.44659794[source]▶
Windows already tracks file usage (e.g. recent files), maybe that could be set to keep more history.
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2. diggan ◴[23 Jul 25 15:48 UTC] No.44660552[source]▶
I'm not sure if both you and previous parent don't know, but the main useful thing with Recall is understanding whatever is on the screen, not just file accesses, or URLs visited but basically anything. So while Google's activity might see some parts, recent files sees another and so on, deriving that from screenshots captures everything you'd see on the screen.
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3. crtasm ◴[23 Jul 25 16:41 UTC] No.44661171[source]▶
I'm aware. You suggested querying local file access history based on their contents, that could be achieved without taking screenshots and OCRing them.