Microsoft’s Recall App Keeps Getting Flagged by Security Researchers Despite Company’s Safety Claims

Security researchers have repeatedly challenged that characterization. Alexander Hagenah, executive director of SIX, a Zurich-based technology company that operates stock exchange infrastructure in Switzerland and Spain, published a detailed account of Recall’s security weaknesses in April 2025 and released a tool he called TotalRecall that could extract all images captured by Recall with no encryption barriers and no advanced technical knowledge required. The University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Information Security issued a warning the same month, describing Recall as introducing “substantial and unacceptable security, legality, and privacy challenges” and urging administrators of Windows environments at the university to disable the feature entirely.

In response to that criticism, Microsoft scaled back its rollout plans, restricting Recall access to participants in its much smaller Windows Insider program rather than deploying it across all compatible Windows 11 machines. But the concerns have not gone away. Hagenah recently published a new proof-of-concept tool called Total Recall Reloaded, demonstrating that malware running on a user’s PC can copy every Recall screenshot as it passes through in-process memory without requiring administrator access or a kernel exploit. He noted that he has reported additional undisclosed vulnerabilities to Microsoft and will not release the technical details until they are patched.

Malicious actors have already begun writing code to exploit Recall’s screenshot data, with some malware capable of accessing Recall’s own memory to copy screen captures and transmit them to remote servers. Security writer Kevin Beaumont has published a technical overview of how the procedure works, and pre-written code to carry it out is now circulating.

The fundamental tension at the heart of Recall’s problems is one that software engineers have long struggled to resolve. Making data highly convenient for users to access and making it impervious to outside attack are competing goals, and Microsoft has found that the gap between them is difficult to close without compromising one or the other. As of now, fewer than 10% of Windows 11 PCs can enable and run the current version of Recall, and reports indicate Microsoft is reassessing its broader AI push on Windows, with a significant rethink of both Copilot and Recall reportedly underway.