Hi, your friendly local IT person here. If you see anything about "Oh Microsoft secretly enabled Recall on ALL 24H2 computers! You can't turn it off and now Microsoft sees everything you do!"
I want you to
1: Take a Breath.
2: Think about how much of Microsoft's revenue is from Businesses (aka like 80% of it).
3: Realize that all of this information is coming from one dude's blog who runs custom scripts on top of Microsoft's installers, which broke something, so he started spreading FUD.
Now, I'm going to caveat some stuff straight away before going into a bit more detail.
Do I trust Microsoft to never try to enable this more widely? No I do not. However the hardware that it takes to run this stuff *does not exist* on current systems. You would have to buy a new computer for this to be able to work, from a hardware level. It isn't something they can decide to make active on everyone's current computers.
And yes, this is all in support of AI bullshit, which Microsoft does also have a vested interest in figuring out how to make money off of. The whole situation is Not Great.
However.
The panic and misinformation I'm seeing about Recall is reaching chemtrails-level of conspiracy and fearmongering.
The short version is, unless you specifically buy a new, Microsoft Copilot+ branded PC, you WILL NOT HAVE RECALL ON YOUR SYSTEM.
Could this maybe change in the future? Sure, maybe 5+ years from now, but you'd still need to have bought a particular type of computer in that time. And you bet your ass that businesses out there will go at Microsoft with pitchforks if Microsoft tried to pull in all of their proprietary data.
"But I see it enabled on my system!"
Having the parts of a feature like this on your system that are a small amount of what is required to run the full feature, is nothing new.
Microsoft can either choose to include the "bits" to be able to enable Recall on their own hardware inside their OS installers, or they have to create entirely separate install media for their hardware. Hell a few years ago they mashed up *all* of their install versions (Edu/Home/Pro/Enterprise) into one installer.
Last post (at least for now) on this, but please feel free to reach out to me if you have questions on this.
I don't consider myself an expert on the Windows Kernal or anything like that, but I have extensive experience customizing deployments of Windows, using a lot of the tools and engaging with a lot of the systems being talked about with all this Recall stuff.
Ken