Windows Recall: What Microsoft Announced by 28 May 2024

Editor’s note (25 October 2026): This is a historical explainer of Microsoft’s 20 May 2024 plan, as it stood on 28 May. Later changes are kept in a separate section below. For current setup details, see Microsoft’s current Recall guidance .

On 20 May 2024, Microsoft announced Recall as a way to find something you had seen on a Copilot+ PC: search with a text or visual clue, browse a timeline of snapshots and return to the original page, document or message. The idea sounded useful. It also raised a harder question: a feature that searches screen activity needs to process what appears on screen.

On 28 May, Recall was still a planned preview. Microsoft said it would begin on Copilot+ PCs from 18 June, so there was no public version to test. This article records the announcement at the time, rather than reviewing a released feature.

Microsoft said Recall would build a personal semantic index and store it and its snapshots on the device. It also described controls to pause saving, delete individual snapshots or time ranges, and filter apps and websites. Those were the company’s published plans; readers could not yet try the controls themselves. Microsoft’s 20 May announcement set out the consumer feature and its planned preview.

What Microsoft had announced—and what remained open

The distinction between an announced design and a tested feature matters here. As of 28 May, these were the public claims and the checks that still had to wait for a release.

Local storage answered one privacy question

Microsoft said the index and snapshots would stay on the PC. That tells readers where the company planned to store them. The May launch post did not provide a detailed security architecture, and no public build was available to check how the controls behaved. Local storage is useful information, but it does not by itself explain what a screen capture includes, how filters behave, or who can open saved data.

Recall’s proposed value depended on finding content across apps, websites and documents. A screen can contain work material, private messages or financial details. That makes the capture and exclusion rules as relevant as the storage location. Before relying on a filter, a user would need to see exactly which apps and sites it covers and what happens when it is active.

There was also a contemporaneous regulator enquiry. On 22 May 2024, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office said it was making enquiries with Microsoft to understand the safeguards. That was an enquiry, not a finding that Recall had breached data-protection law or evidence that an incident had occurred. The ICO’s statement gives the exact status.

This is a wider question than browser history. Our guide to Chrome Incognito on a shared PC explains what a browser’s private session clears and what can remain on the device. Recall was presented as a system-level search across apps and documents, so the scope was different.

A practical checklist for someone considering Recall

• Check whether the PC qualifies. Microsoft described Recall as a Copilot+ PC feature; on 28 May, it was not something to switch on across any Windows 11 computer.
• List the apps and websites where sensitive information appears. Treat the list as questions to test later, not as proof that Recall had already captured a particular screen.
• When a public build arrives, check the setup choice and default, how to pause saving, how to add filters, how to delete saved snapshots, and how each Windows account is protected.

For a work or school PC, ask the administrator before enabling a feature that may index screen activity. Microsoft’s business announcement said Intune could disable snapshot saving and described central app and website filtering policies as planned for later. The May 2024 business post did not establish that those future filtering policies were already available.

What changed after 28 May

On 7 June—after the date of this article—Microsoft announced a clearer opt-in during setup, Windows Hello enrollment and presence checks, just-in-time decryption, and encryption of the search-index database. On 13 June, Microsoft changed the release plan from a broad preview on 18 June to a Windows Insider preview first. These are later changes, not details a buyer could verify on 28 May. Microsoft’s dated Recall update records both changes.

At the end of May, readers could judge Recall’s promise, but they could not verify its safeguards in a public version. The sensible next step was to wait for the preview, check the actual setup and controls, and then decide whether searchable PC memory fit the way they used their device.