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Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all (mashable.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Who is surprised?

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[–] 32 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Hmm, I wonder if there could be an exploit where Recall is covertly turned on, so it can be used to exfiltrate data. Not a good idea to basically have a surveillance rootkit sitting passively on your system, with no ability to remove it, just waiting to get abused by attackers. But using this proprietary garbage OS nowadays isn't a good idea in general and there is a much better alternative.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Windows does have its own command-line package manager. I don't know if it can remove Recall, but last I checked it could remove Cortana. It would just get reinstalled soon after, but that could be prevented with some file-naming trickery. If you give a file the same name as the folder used to have and make it read-only, it couldn't remake the folder and wouldn't reinstall.

    I wouldn't be surprised if you can still do that now.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Which one do you mean? Winget which is their newest attempt at creating a package manager that isn't an absolute piece of garbage, or their crappy CLI for managing MSIX/APPX modules? Because I remember using the latter to try and remove Cortana back when I first tried Windows 10. Fast forward, I removed all the garbage I didn't need, applied a Windows update, restarted my PC and it was all reinstalled. I wiped that SSD the same day and went back to Linux. This was the last time I used Windows on any of my personal devices.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'd say you didn't actually remove the garbage. "Settings, apps, uninstall" doesn't really get rid of it, the deployment package is still hanging around.

    You need to use powershell to de-deploy those packages.

    It's a bit like the difference between "apt remove" and "apt purge"

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    There's always the Microsoft telemetry blocklist in pihole. If you can't stop the computer collecting the data, you can stop MS getting hold of it.

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