Next Brave Browser release will block Windows from taking automatic screenshots

When Microsoft announced Windows Recall, a controversial AI feature designed to give users access to past activity on the PC by taking screenshots of pretty much anything that happened on the screen, it quickly realized that many were not heralding Recall as the first step into Windows' AI future.

Recall was criticized for its invasive nature and lack of security features. Microsoft went back to the drawing board and addressed some of the concerns in a new version of Recall.

While Microsoft did indeed address major issues, for instance by switching Recall from being opt-out to requiring users to enable it, it still gave Recall almost free-reign once enabled. While Microsoft blocks Recall from capturing certain windows, for instance private browsing windows of popular browsers, it lacks granular options to handle the screen capturing part of it.

Developers have now started to implement protections against Recall into their apps. The messaging app Signal introduced  a protective feature in its Windows version that is blocking screenshots entirely.

Brave Browser: Block Microsoft Recall

The makers of Brave Browser announced a similar feature this week on X. The next release of Brave Browser, version 1.81, will block Microsoft Recall from capturing any Brave window by default.

You find it under Settings > Privacy and Security > Block Microsoft Recall (or by loading brave://settings/privacy directly). It is enabled by default and will block Recall on Windows from taking screenshots of any open Brave tabs.

Users who want to use Recall need to turn off the blocking, if they want Brave tabs and windows to be included.

How is Brave blocking Recall? Simple, by "telling" Windows that all Brave windows are private. You may recall that Windows Recall does not take screenshots of private browsing windows of popular browsers. The feature marks all browser windows of Brave Browser as private to block Recall entirely.

Closing Words

Recall will probably never become the "killer" AI feature that Microsoft hoped it would be. Now that it needs to be enabled, it seems likely that only a small percentage of Windows users will use the feature. Considering that it is only available on Copilot+ PCs, the likelihood of it becoming a system-seller is slim.

Regardless of that, it is good to see that some developers are taking matters into their own hands and adding more protections to their applications.

Now You: do you plan to use Recall once it becomes available? Or do you prefer to keep it as far away from your systems as possible?

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☞ El artículo completo original de Martin Brinkmann lo puedes ver aquí