So I see that Microsoft is again pushing Recall out into WIn 11.
And I can kinda sorta see the use case for having Recall, if I squint very hard indeed (except that there is no way it will ever be rolled out in the environment that could actually use it.)
The functionality that Recall would create and provide has a use case in the Microsoft using environment that is The Workplace.
I work in an office with the usual Microsoft products - Office, Teams and Sharepoint.
And the software stack is a nightmare for collaborative working, just completely corrosive and with high friction everywhere.
Example. If I ask someone for a piece of information, and they send me a file, great!
But a week later, where is it?
Because it could be in my email. I might have saved it to my local drive, or to the Sharepoint hosted version instead. Or the groups Sharepoint.It could be in Teams, in Teams chat, or the Teams groupchat. Or maybe I'm looking for the wrong thing, because it wasn't the file it was a link to the file and that is a whole new search issue. Again, the link could be anywhere in the above, and point to anywhere in the above.
This total user experience mess (and mess is far too kind a word) makes day to day search and recovery of information (Microsoft is incompetent at basic search, we all know this, just look at the Search bar, and Bing) an issue. And from that perspective Recall provides a solution to that issue. If you can't do search (and Microsoft cannot) then brute force it and take a screenshot of the desktop every 3 seconds. And hope for the best. (Which will be interesting to see how it goes in practice, because again, Microsoft is an interstate multilane in clown car gridlock when it comes to search).
It's like saving a game by building a log of every user action up to that point, and then replaying their game for them very very very fast when they open the save file.
So the high friction high frustration productivity destroying work environment that is the Microsoft software ecosystem means that you can kinda sorta see a use case there, provided you can ignore all the trust and access issues the actual Recall functionality creates. Mmmm. Good luck with that.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/04/microsoft-is-putting-privacy-endangering-recall-back-into-windows-11/