One year after its rocky launch, Microsoft’s Windows Recall still raises security red flags

Microsoft says its Recall app — which captures and stores screen shots every few seconds — is safe. Security researchers keep saying otherwise.

Recall was originally billed as a “photographic memory” to store everything Windows users do on their computers. People could then see some of those screen shots at a later time by searching AI with plain-text queries such as red barn. (See illustration above.)

Select members of Microsoft’s exclusive Windows Insider program have had access to Recall for more than a year. Users of AI-enabled Copilot+ PCs started receiving Recall as an opt-in feature in April 2025, one year ago this month.

But since its debut, experts have repeatedly demonstrated that hackers can access the data Recall stores. This raises questions about whether a tool that records your…