Just yesterday, my colleague got some new laptops. They had MS Copilot and "recall’ pre-installed. He told me that this combination will keep track and store all activities on the machine (may be even upload to the cloud?). For example, it is possible to go back on usage history and look up answers like “what credit card did I use 3 days ago on ‘this’ website”.
This is scary to me - surveillance and tracking, not to mention other implications.
Said feature should be recalled. I can’t see any business wanting that.
Switch over to local account
https://www.howtogeek.com/836157/how-to-use-windows-11-with-a-local-account/
I dont quite see how a “local” account will help, when key-logging, screen-logging and all the user interface logging is enabled and recording …
Nice to know that details of disabling this via registry change is already on the net … but how many will know or even disable this, i wonder …
Not to mention that MS can and most likely decide that it is in my best interest and enable it with future update and not bother to ‘inform’ …
In that scenario the use of a local account won’t stop the recording, but it will stop the uploading to Microsoft.
I’ve just got a new W11 laptop as a backup in case my current one dies, first thing I did (well not actually the first, cos it took about half an hour to go through various installation stuff) was to choose not to enable Co-Pilot, even though I didn’t really look into what it does in any detail. And yes, I managed to get through the whole setup without logging into MS or providing details to do so.
Simple! No MS account to fetch the data to. However, your machine can still be fingerprinted. But almost all activity on the internet is fingerprinted these days by most websites.
I for one. Probably most will not even care or be bothered. The complacent consumer is the ideal consumer.
Once a local account is set up it can not be made non local. An email address has to be used.
Can also give Shutup a try
Thanks RobBob!
the reasons.json file may be worth perusing.
Cant say no to that. Thanks!
I don’t like and don’t use windows personally, but it pays indirectly my salary, by making my work sought after
With W11 it went nuts, weird problems with VMs, sometimes even my code compiled in a VM is broken with no compilation error (cryptographic heavy code works incorrectly), reboot the host, recompile and it’s magically fixed. Some may say it’s a feature (whatever is the goal of that feature, I don’t want to elaborate on that) but I say it’s just a broken virtualization 