Copilot Vision is an extension of Microsoft's divisive Recall, a feature initially sort of exclusive to the Copilot+ systems with a neural co-processor of sufficient computational power. Like Recall, which was pulled due to serious security failings and subject to a lengthy delay before its eventual relaunch, Copilot Vision is designed to analyze everything you do on your computer.
It does this, when enabled, by capturing constant screenshots and feeding them to an optical character recognition system and a large language model for analysis – but where Recall works locally, Copilot Vision sends the data off to Microsoft servers.
According to a Microsoft spokesperson back in April, users' data will not be stored long-term, aside from transcripts of the conversation with the Copilot assistant itself, and "are not used for model training or ads personalisation."
In Win11 Pro/Enterprise, this can be disabled via Group Policy alongside most other tracking and logging "features". In corporate environments, it often is. Their primary target here is individual consumers.
On the other hand, even on Home edition you can at least disable this yourself with a few registry tweaks or by using a tool like DoNotSpy11. I highly recommend checking it out if you're forced to use Windows but want some semblance of privacy.
They’d better hope this setting works, or MS will get sued for “stealing trade secrets” by some ambitious corpo lawyer looking to make some $$$.
MS+NSA cooperate in industrial espionage. At least against non-American companies.
I mean from my tests it does seem to work, tho I also just straight-up nuke Copilot in its entirety when setting Win11 up