Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published to the company’s original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn’t elaborate further on specific changes it’s making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June.

For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the OCR text and the screenshots to a giant searchable database on your PC. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to help users retrace their steps and dig up information about things they had used their PCs to find or do in the past.

The problem was that other users on the same PC, or attackers with physical or remote access to your PC, could easily access, view, and export those screenshots and the OCR database since none of the information was encrypted at rest or protected in any substantive way.

Microsoft had planned to launch Recall as one of the flagship features of its Copilot+ PC launch in July, along with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Surface devices, but its rollout was bumped back and then paused entirely so that Recall could be reworked and then sent out to Windows Insiders for testing like most other Windows features are.

Among the changes Microsoft has said it will make: The database will be encrypted at rest and will require authentication (and periodic reauthentication) with Windows Hello before users will be allowed to access it. The feature will also be off by default, whereas the original plan was to turn it on by default and make users go into Settings to turn it off.

“Security continues to be our top priority and when Recall is available for Windows Insiders in October we will publish a blog with more details,” reads today’s update to Microsoft Windows and Devices Corporate Vice President Pavan Davuluri’s blog post.

When the preview is released, Windows Insiders who want to test the Recall preview will need to do it on a PC that meets Microsoft’s Copilot+ system requirements. Those include a processor with a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The x86 builds of Windows for Intel and AMD processors don’t currently support any Copilot+ features regardless of whether the PC meets those requirements, but that should change later this year.

That said, security researchers and reporters who found the holes in the original version of Recall could only find them because it was possible to enable them on unsupported PCs, just as it’s possible to run Windows 11 on PCs that don’t meet the system requirements. It’s possible that users will figure out how to get Recall and other Copilot+ features running on unsupported PCs at some point, too.

Microsoft is making changes to a controversial feature announced for its new range of PCs powered by artificial intelligence after it was flagged as a potential “privacy nightmare”.

The company billed the “Recall” feature for Copilot+ as a way to make users’ lives easier by capturing and storing screenshots of their desktop activity.

But after people claimed hackers might be able to misuse the tool and its saved screenshots, Microsoft is making the feature opt-in instead.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data watchdog, had said it was “making enquiries” with Microsoft about the tool after concerns were raised.

“We have heard a clear signal that we can make it easier for people to choose to enable Recall on their Copilot+ PC and improve privacy and security safeguards,” said Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president of Windows and devices, on Friday.

Mr Davuluri shared the update in a blog post.

The “Recall” tool featured prominently during the unveiling of Microsoft’s new PCs at its developer conference in May. The company is counting on artificial intelligence (AI) to drive demand for its devices.

Executive vice president Yusuf Medhi said during the event’s keynote speech that the feature used AI “to make it possible to access virtually anything you have ever seen on your PC” and likened it to having photographic memory.

The feature can search through a users’ past activity, including their files, photos, emails and browsing history.

While this is something lots of other devices do, the tool would also take screenshots every few seconds and search these too.

Microsoft said it “built privacy into Recall’s design” from the outset and users would have control over what was captured – such as by opting out of capturing certain websites or not capturing private browsing on Microsoft’s browser, Edge.

It said changes to the feature would give people a “clearer choice” to opt in to saving screenshots during set-up of the PCs, and would otherwise be turned off by default.

Users will also be required to use Windows’ “Hello” authentication process to enable the tool, and their “proof of presence” will be required if they want to view their timeline of saved activity or search through it in Recall.

The updates will be implemented before Copilot+ PCs launch on 18 June.