After Signal now Brave also doesn’t recall.
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In other news alongside Introducing Lumo, the AI where every conversation is confidential | Proton
Brave, being partially inspired by Signal blocking recall also did it too, treating every tab as private, amazing job to the team!
Originally found and then reposted from Techlore socials
Starting in version 1.81 for Windows users, Brave browser will block Microsoft Recall from automatically taking screenshots of your browsing activity.
Why we’re doing this
Microsoft first announced Recall in May 2024 and immediately drew fire from security and privacy advocates. Recall saved full-screen screenshots every few seconds and stored them in a local plaintext database, leaving it open for exploitation by anyone (including malware) who had access to the machine. The outcry caused Microsoft to hastily roll back the feature and re-work it significantly.
A year later, Recall is back, and Brave is ready for it. We will disable it by default for Windows 11+ users, with a toggle to turn it back on for users who really want Recall.
Block Microsoft Recall toggle in brave://settings/privacy for Windows 11 (and newer) users
Microsoft has, to their credit, made several security and privacy-positive changes to Recall in response to concerns. Still, the feature is in preview, and Microsoft plans to roll it out more widely soon. What exactly the feature will look like when it’s fully released to all Windows 11 users is still up in the air, but the initial tone-deaf announcement does not inspire confidence.
Given Brave’s focus on privacy-maximizing defaults and what is at stake here (your entire browsing history), we have proactively disabled Recall for all Brave tabs. We think it’s vital that your browsing activity on Brave does not accidentally end up in a persistent database, which is especially ripe for abuse in highly-privacy-sensitive cases such as intimate partner violence.
How we implemented this
Microsoft has said that private browsing windows on browsers will not be saved as snapshots. We’ve extended that logic to apply to all Brave browser windows. We tell the operating system that every Brave tab is ‘private’, so Recall never captures it. This is yet another example of how Brave engineers are able to quickly tweak Chromium’s privacy functionality to make Brave safer for our users (inexhaustive list here). For more technical details, see the pull request implementing this feature.
Brave is the only major Web browser that disables Microsoft Recall by default in all tabs.
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