Microsoft builds on Recall with Gaming Copilot – fails basic privacy tests

You may remember my blog on Microsoft Recall:

With Windows 11, Microsoft are currently rolling out Gaming Copilot to all customers. This uses Copilot Vision (similar to Recall under the hood), and basically inspects what gamers are doing using AI in order to give them hints and tips and such.

The software is labelled Beta, but is being pushed out to existing PCs anyway because.. well.. why not beta something in prod, it’s 2025 after all.

It appears in Game Bar, which is accessible from Windows Key + G. You may not have it yet as they are staging deployment. I’m not in Windows Insiders, but I have it installed — so it looks like the roll out is becoming wide. Note that I had uninstalled Copilot from my PC… but Gaming Copilot silently installed anyway.

The UI looks like this:

Press enter or click to view image in full size

There’s no onboarding steps, no notification it got installed, and there’s no choosing privacy options. I’m in the UK, so I’m surprised.

By default, it silently captures screenshots of gameplay:

Press enter or click to view image in full size

The way this works under the hood is basically Copilot Vision AI:

It is similar to Recall, except not all the processing is done locally — it relies on the cloud. It screenshots gameplay, and then extracts elements of the screen (such as symbols and text) to work out what the player is doing. The idea is it can help you game, e.g. you can ask questions about what you’re doing in the game at a given moment.

Network traffic is set to Microsoft about what the gamer is playing and doing, using currently undocumented endpoints hosted on Azure — at least I can’t find the endpoints listed on Microsoft’s website, or anywhere on Google search.

It is also set by default to train Microsoft’s AI models on text, along with record conversations and inferred interests to “personalise your experience”, which according to the linked Microsoft online privacy policy may be used for advertising, amongst other things.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

You can disable the Gaming Copilot widget from the game bar, however from experimentation so far the network traffic is still running with the user interface not open — I don’t know if this is a feature or a bug.

My opinion is Microsoft needs to add an onboarding wizard outside of Game Bar for this, turn off model training on text and screenshots by default — people should opt in — and be very clear how this feature works.

I’m still looking at the cybersecurity implications — more on that soon, it is funky as it adds a new attack surface to Windows 11 PCs.