I don’t know if you have seen Signal’s decision to block screenshots from Microsoft? They had to, because Microsoft has that ultimate spy tool called “Recall”, which takes machine-readable screenshots of users’ screens each 3 seconds.
What that means is that even if you *don’t* use a Windows operating system, and you never even complied to their EULA, they might still get your data through programs like Signal, WhatsApp, and the likes. Or seen the other way around, in case you’re running Windows 11 you’re actively sharing all your friends’ and colleagues’ data – without their consent.
This nonsense has to stop, and I’m pretty sure that the EU parliament – maybe with a little help from noyb, EFF, FSFE and the likes – will cancel that. Or at least I hope so.
If they don’t, then I’d advise everyone to not run or update to Windows 11 – there are way better alternatives around anyway. Newbies or companies could and probably should decide to use Ubuntu Linux instead, and to friends and family I always recommend a Linux distribution which can’t even be bought or sold, because it’s no “business”. That would be Debian, which I’m using daily, and even my late brother Willi (RIP) never wanted anything else after he tried it. And for those who are a bit more tech-savvy and who want to live more on the “bleeding edge” as they say, you could try Arch Linux, or run Debian Sid (aka ‘unstable’) which does pretty much the same as a so-called ‘rolling release distro’.
So – let’s stop Microsoft, either from screen scraping for profit, or let’s stop them for good by not using their creepy stuff anymore.
And if Recall isn’t reason enough to stop Microsoft, maybe this is?
As always, thanks for reading.
Update, from the same day:
As someone informed me via Signal, and to be fair, “Recall” is now opt-in, and it also needs pretty decent hardware (for “AI”), and a Windows Hello account and login to work. See Wikipedia for more. However, why does it need Windows Hello and a biometric login if – as they claim – it stores data only locally? This still lets me think along the Register article about the news from Signal, and they claimed:
“‘Take a screenshot every few seconds’ legitimately sounds like a suggestion from a low-parameter LLM that was given a prompt like ‘How do I add an arbitrary AI feature to my operating system as quickly as possible in order to make investors happy?'”
So it wasn’t my intention to frighten anyone, but I’m still not convinced that anyone would need something like it. My 2 (Euro-) Cents…
Again, thanks for reading.
