Privacy-focused web browser Brave has become one of the first Windows programs to stop blocking Microsoft’s Windows Recall feature from capturing screenshots of Brave Windows. New versions of the browser will feature a toggle that automatically blocks Windows Recall by default, but can be disabled by the user.
The company announced the new feature, claiming, “given Brave’s focus on privacy-maximizing defaults and what is at stake here (your entire browsing history), we have proactively disabled Recall for all Brave tabs.” An issue raised on the browser’s GitHub repository explains that developers are using Microsoft’s SetInputScope API to tell Windows that the browser’s contents are captured or indexed.
According to the issue notes, “Microsoft says that a Web browser can use SetInputScope to set the scope to be IS_PRIVATE to make sure that Recall doesn’t save the user’s browsing history.” The issue goes on to state that “Recall is antithetical to Brave’s goals as a privacy-first browser,” and hence is disabled in Brave by default going forward. The change is live in Brave’s nightly builds and should roll out to stable releases in the coming weeks.
Brave isn’t the only Windows program taking a stand against Recall. In May, end-to-end encrypted messenger Signal also blocked Windows Recall by enabling a DRM management flag in the program. While this prevents Recall from screenshotting Signal chats, it can cause issues with accessibility software such as screen readers and navigation assist programs. In such cases, disabling the setting can fix the problem.
Recall was first announced in May 2024 and immediately took flak from security and privacy advocates. Shortly after the feature launched, security experts demonstrated that data collected by Recall could be stolen by an attacker. To their credit, Microsoft has made a bunch of security and privacy-focused changes to Recall, including disabling it by default and giving users the option to toggle it as per their choice.
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