Microsoft says AI feature that captures screenshots on new PCs will be off by default after backlash
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at an event on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, on May 20, 2024.
Chona Kasinger | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft said an artificial intelligence feature on new PCs that captures screenshots and enables search of user activity will be off by default after security researchers determined that attackers could access the underlying data.
The Recall feature was one of the main capabilities Microsoft showed during a press briefing last month for forthcoming Copilot+ PCs with AI computing power onboard.
“If you don’t proactively choose to turn it on, it will be off by default,” Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s head of Windows and Surface devices, wrote in a blog post on Friday.
Microsoft has been trying to balance competing interests of late as it moves to incorporate new generative AI tools into its products and to keep up with the competition. While the market is evolving rapidly, user privacy and security are under a microscope. A U.S. government review board recently criticized Microsoft’s handling of China’s breach of U.S. government officials’ email accounts.
Microsoft has already added the Copilot conversational chatbot into Windows in a way that resembles OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT. Both ChatGPT and Copilot rely on servers in the cloud to perform necessary computations and then send back responses to PCs. Recall is different in that it keeps data on users’ computers and doesn’t need to access supplemental computing power over the internet.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, directed employees to put security first and announced changes to its security practices following the U.S. government report.
After Microsoft announced Recall, which can search through a log of previous actions on PCs, industry experts began questioning the potential for hackers to retrieve users’ information.
Security practitioners released software called Total Recall that displays data Recall collects.
“Windows Recall stores everything locally in an unencrypted SQLite database, and the screenshots are simply saved in a folder on your PC,” they wrote in a description of Total Recall on GitHub. They expressed concern about attackers developing tools that can look for usernames and passwords contained in Recall screenshots.
Microsoft is adding security protections to Recall in addition to requiring people to manually turn it on once Copilot+ PCs become available on June 18. The search index database will be encrypted, Microsoft said.
“Windows Hello enrollment is required to enable Recall,” Davuluri wrote. “In addition, proof of presence is also required to view your timeline and search in Recall.”
With Windows Hello, users prove their identity by entering a PIN number, showing their face to the PC camera or providing a fingerprint.
“I think overall having a choice around opting in on home systems will save a lot of people security problems further down the line,” Kevin Beaumont, a former Microsoft cybersecurity analyst who criticized the original implementation of Recall, said in a Friday post on X. “It never should have been enabled by default.”
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The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.
Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.
Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.
“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”
Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.
Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.
Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.
Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.
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The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.
Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.
The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.
“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.
In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.
“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.
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