Development of a feature like this surely started during the WFH craze, where managers could no longer casually walk behind people who had to have their monitors facing outwards. A market opened up, and this is not the only tool for this sort of corporate surveillance.
Certain Software Engineers will probably get some time without it by claiming they need Admin rights and that the system messes up their graphics or slows down their system or what have you.
Workplace surveillance of employees became widespread in part because of sexual harassment laws, employers suddenly had to protect themselves from litigation.
That doesn't seem plausible given that "scientific management" is quite a bit older and one of its main concepts comes from an experiment in surveillance from 1927.
The linked article does not support what you say in any way. If anything, it argues that invasion of privacy can actually be used against somebody by getting things out of context. It is definitely not what the link talks about, spending 1/3 of the text writing about how wrongfully invasion of privacy was used during Clinton's impeachment. Maybe you meant to share something else?
This is a really pernicious lie. If you believe this sort of thing, explain why you think sexual harassment laws are unfair, and why corporations were so trusting of their employees before that.
Hint: They weren’t trusting. Corporate surveillance follows technology. The bosses are obsessed with watching their workers every second. This is nothing new. What’s new is that we now do most of our work on networked computers, cameras are vanishingly cheap, and data storage is abundant.
I agree. I believe this project was started in totally good faith. I think one of the managers is on HN here?
I actually want this feature. My memory is awful and I am constantly going to Chrome's History function.
This feature isn't bad, I just want it encrypted locally with no telemetry, which sadly I realize most tech companies love spamming their products these days.
In my times at the MS mothership I never met any managers or developers that were malicious or had bad intent. Sometimes they were overly profit-motivated, but the conversations were always "How much can we price this feature at?" not "How can I make a really evil feature that I can sell?"
It's not even only about surveillance. Microsoft also makes Github Copilot. Getting Recall onto developer machines gives them the opportunity to train their AI on how programmers actually program, rather than just using an LLM trained on code.
Eventually we'll have programmers with Recall activated by company policy on their PCs, actively training the AI models that will replace their labor.
That has to be part of the goal here. The full automation of software development. Think about how much money Microsoft would make if they did it, and how much they would save if they implemented it.
We need a new Luddite movement to protect the workers from all of this.
Typing is the least interesting part of programming. And most of the other doing parts have been automated already (compiling, testing, deploying,…) Most of my days are mostly spent reading, thinking, and waiting.
I work in a massive data center. Manned by very few people. I often think about how many homes could be heated or cooled with the power used to prop up the internet.
It feels borderline criminal when there are homeless and hungry all over the world.
You are very lucky if you have a choice of OS at work.
In any case, something like this wouldn't be hard to implement on Linux. And if Windows normalizes it in corporate environments, rest assured that other parties will offer it for Linux as well.
I don’t really care in corporate settings. I don’t like to bring personal stuff on my work machine anyway. Most of the time the only thing I keep is a picture for setting up my profiles. I have my personal computer or my phone nearby when I want to do these stuff.
Lol, if they want to use Linux the company will just give them a virtual linux machine and have them use it via windows... recall will still sorta work.
Development of a feature like this surely started during the WFH craze, where managers could no longer casually walk behind people who had to have their monitors facing outwards. A market opened up, and this is not the only tool for this sort of corporate surveillance.
Certain Software Engineers will probably get some time without it by claiming they need Admin rights and that the system messes up their graphics or slows down their system or what have you.