Overview
Recall is a Windows 11 feature that photographs your screen roughly every five seconds whenever the picture changes, runs text and image recognition over the results on the device, and gives you a searchable timeline of everything you have looked at. Microsoft announced it in May 2024 for Copilot+ PCs, pulled the preview the following month after security researchers took it apart in public, and began shipping it broadly with the April 2025 Windows preview update, close to a year late. It needs Copilot+ hardware with a fast neural processor, a drive of at least 256 GB, and 50 GB free.
It matters more than a single feature normally would because of where it sits. This is not an app you evaluate and install. It is part of the operating system on a large and growing share of new Windows laptops, and for most people the decision is whether to say yes to a prompt during setup, once, while doing something else.
What It Knows About You
Everything on the screen. Not a category of data, the screen. Bank balances, medical portals, messages from people who agreed to none of this, draft documents, the contents of a password manager if it happens to be open. Microsoft added a filter that tries to skip snapshots showing passwords and card numbers, and lets you exclude named apps, named sites, and private browsing sessions.
The structural fact that changes the rating: snapshots stay on the device. Recall does not upload your timeline to Microsoft, and the index sits in an encrypted store gated behind Windows Hello. That one design decision is most of the distance between this entry and an F, and it is worth saying plainly, because nearly everything else in this Index is about data leaving.
Retention is yours to set, and the defaults are generous. Disk allocation runs from 10 GB to 150 GB, with the oldest snapshots dropped once the cap is reached, and administrators can hold storage duration to 30, 60, 90 or 180 days or leave it unlimited. On a large drive with the dial left where it lands, a Recall store is a months-long visual record of a working life, held in one place, on one machine.
The Real Risks
The filter leaks. GeekWire’s one-year review in 2026 found researchers still finding ways in, and reporting through 2026 describes the sensitivity filter missing things under ordinary conditions: figures on a banking page, identifiers sitting inside a document, a password visible for the second before the field masks it. Microsoft’s own framing is that the filter is best effort, and best effort against a camera pointed at your screen every five seconds is a lot of misses.
Windows Hello is not the wall it was sold as. Kevin Beaumont showed in 2024 that the withdrawn build kept its database somewhere any malware running as the user could read it. Microsoft rebuilt around a hardware enclave and biometric unlock. In 2026 the researcher Alexander Hagenah demonstrated a technique where malicious code triggers the Windows Hello prompt itself and reads the store once the user authenticates, riding along with a legitimate unlock rather than breaking it.
Consent stops at your keyboard. Anyone who messages you is recorded by your Recall regardless of what they chose. Signal responded by switching on Windows screen-security DRM in its desktop app by default, so Signal windows come back blank in snapshots, and said Microsoft had left it no other option. That defence costs Signal users working screen readers and their own screenshots, which is the shape of the problem: the burden landed on the app trying to protect people.
The device becomes the disclosure. A Recall store turns a laptop handover into a data event, whether that is a repair, a resale, a stolen bag, or a subpoena. Trade coverage in April 2026 described IT asset disposal firms rewriting their procedures, because a generic attestation that user data was destroyed no longer answers whether the snapshot store specifically was purged, and the only moment that can be verified is on the running machine before it leaves the desk.
Regulators noticed early. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office said in May 2024 that it was making inquiries with Microsoft about the safeguards in place. Separately, the snapshot export feature, which hands your snapshots to third-party apps behind a one-time code Microsoft cannot recover, is being rolled out in the European Economic Area only. Both the portability answer and the new extraction surface currently stop at that border.
Alternatives
- Leave it off. The setup prompt is a real choice, and declining costs you nothing you had the day before.
- On a work machine this is usually already settled. Recall is disabled and removed by default on managed devices, and an administrator has to enable the policy before you can opt in at all.
- Narrow it rather than refusing it. App and site exclusions, a short storage duration, and a small disk allocation turn a months-long archive into a couple of weeks of it.
- Ordinary file search, browser history and a notes file cover most of what people actually want from Recall, which is usually the answer to “what was that page”. They are worse at it. They also do not keep a photograph of your bank screen.
- Buy hardware without a Copilot+ neural processor if you want the question closed rather than managed, since the feature is not available there.
Our Verdict
B, and the privacy score of 8 is among the highest we have given anything. The grade holds because four of the five things measured here are genuinely low. Recall displaces nobody’s job, produces no judgements about people, sends no history to a server, and holds nothing hostage when you switch it off. The risk is real, concentrated in one dimension, and local.
The delay is what earns Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. The 2024 version was indefensible and was withdrawn rather than defended, and the version that shipped is off by default, gated behind biometric unlock, removed outright on managed devices, and deletable at will. Those are changes to the product, not to the FAQ.
What would move this to a D: Recall enabled by default on consumer machines, snapshot content or text derived from it leaving the device for any purpose including model training, or a demonstrated remote extraction that does not require code already running as the signed-in user. What would move it to an A is nothing available today. A feature that photographs your screen every five seconds does not get an A for behaving well, because the failure mode is the whole record of your week.