Gone, but not forgotten: Recall feature disappears from latest Windows Insider builds

It looks like Microsoft is trying to hide its controversial Recall AI feature, even from the Windows insiders that were supposed to be testing it. Last week, the software giant announced that Recall would not be part of the Windows build that came with the first generation of Copilot+ PCs, but it also said that Insiders would be testing the feature. Now, the latest Insider Builds of Windows on Arm have stripped all references to Recall and the previous build that had it is no longer available.

As recently as this past weekend, Windows Researcher Albacore discovered a brand new Recall feature called Screenray in Windows Insider Canary Build 26236.5000 for arm64 devices. The UI of Recall had also been tweaked to make it easier to navigate through your activity.

But on Tuesday June 18th, the same day that Copilot+ PCs went on sale, Microsoft stopped distribution of Build 26236.5000 to Windows Insiders. "We have temporarily paused the rollout of Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26236 in the Canary Channel," the company wrote on its blog Tuesday.

Yesterday, June 19th, Microsoft came out with a new Windows Insider Build, version 26241.5000, and it's missing any trace of Recall. Theoretically, if you already installed Build 26236.5000 and paused updates or, if you made an ISO of 26236.6000, you might be able to run Recall. However, there's no legit way to download 26236.5000 on your own.

Normally, if you want to download and install an older Insider Build, you can use UUP Dump, a site that lists all the Builds and gives you scripts that will download them and turn them into ISOs for you. However, we got the download script for 26236.5000 from UUP Dump and it gave us an error message saying that the files have been removed from Microsoft's servers.

So clearly Microsoft feels that Recall is so controversial right now that it doesn't want anyone to use it. Perhaps we'll see a new version of Recall appear in a future Insider Build -- the company certainly promised as much -- but when that will happen is a mystery.

"Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks," the company said in a blog post last week.

By "in the coming weeks," Microsoft must have meant not that Insiders would have exclusive access to Recall for a few weeks before launch, but that it would be a few more weeks before Insiders could try it. Still, Recall was available to Insiders even after Microsoft made that announcement, up until the 18th.

Recall drew the ire of privacy and security-conscious users because it keeps a historic record of all of your activity. Researcher Kevin Beaumont found serious security problems in a beta version of Recall, including the fact that the data was stored in a relatively-easy-to-access SQLite database. UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) even announced an investigation into the feature.

Without Recall, Copilot+ PCs are left with three very unimpressive exclusive AI features: Codesigner (an image generation feature for Paint), Studio Effects (blurring and filters for your webcam) and Live Captions with translations. We talk about these  features and more in our Copilot+ PC launch live blog.