After temporarily shelving its controversial Windows Recall feature amid a wave of backlash, Microsoft is back at it – now quietly slipping the screenshotting app into the Windows 11 Release Preview channel for Copilot+ PCs, signaling its near-readiness for general availability.

In May last year, at its Build developer conference, Microsoft introduced Recall, a feature that silently takes screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and stashes them in a local database so you can later scrub through the footage to recall – get it? – what you were doing on your PC at a particular point in time.

The functionality was set to grow to allow you to rummage through that database, using AI, to pull up specific actions based on search terms, as well as take snapshots of application activity, instant messages and other communications, websites viewed, keystrokes, and any other data available, so that it could all be, well, recalled using that AI-powered search.

If you were doing something last week and couldn’t quite remember the details, you could pull it up and replay it using Recall. At the time, Microsoft said the functionality would ship enabled by default on its upcoming Copilot+ PCs. The AI would run locally alongside the database, using the PC’s hardware acceleration.

The upside is that you can jump back to work or study you were doing days ago, which can be handy. The downside, one of them at least, is that your PC is now literally logging everything you’re doing, so if someone were to compromise or steal it, and be able to use it as you, they could not only monitor future activity, they could replay your earlier actions.

Redmond tried to calm the inevitable privacy uproar by claiming its AI would automatically redact sensitive info, such as passwords and financial data, in the browser, but only if you were using Edge.

Microsoft Research chief scientist Jaime Teevan was wheeled out to pitch Recall as a necessity for the AI age. Meanwhile, security researchers such as Alex Hagenah casually sidestepped the software’s data protections with a proof-of-concept tool dubbed TotalRecall, which could extract and display data from Recall’s SQLite database.

Following the backlash from infosec pros, IT admins, privacy advocates, and everyone in between, Redmond paused the launch last June.

But you can’t keep a bad idea down, it seems. By November, Microsoft was quietly trying again — this time with Recall turned off by default and limited to Copilot+ PCs running Windows Insider builds in the Dev Channel, specifically those powered by Qualcomm silicon. Support for Intel and AMD Copilot+ machines followed later.

On Thursday, Microsoft dropped Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 into the Release Preview channel – the final stop before mainstream release – and yes, Recall made the cut. Redmond said Recall will be an opt-in feature that “will roll out gradually,” so you may have to wait for it to be activated for your PC.

“Recall (preview) will be available starting early 2025 in most markets, rolling out to the European Economic Area later this year. Optimized for select languages (English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, and Spanish),” the release’s footnotes state.

The latest Recall build works with major browsers including Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome. Snapshots and the contextual data extracted from them, and seemingly other apps being used, are saved and encrypted locally. Accessing your screenshot archive requires Windows Hello authentication, and you’ll need one of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs with an NPU to handle the AI processing demands.

Redmond insists the data all stays on your PC’s local storage.

“Recall does not share snapshots or associated data with Microsoft or third parties,” it said, “nor is it shared between different Windows users on the same device.

“Windows will ask for your permission before saving snapshots. You are always in control, and you can delete snapshots, pause or turn them off at any time. Any future options for the user to share data will require fully informed explicit action by the user.”

Maybe these changes will be enough to reassure anyone outside of Microsoft management meetings that Recall is a good idea, but we doubt it. Many users may be ready to “consider this a divorce,” to quote a certain Austrian-American. ®