In the last few days, Microsoft Recall, the company’s upcoming AI-powered feature that makes everything you do on your Windows machine searchable has been criticised by both developers and users citing privacy and security concerns.

While the company has addressed some of these issues by disabling the feature out of the box and adding Windows Hello security authentication, the tech giant is most likely already tracking everything.

Back when Microsoft introduced Timeline, a less capable version of Recall, the company also added a new functionality called ‘Activity Tracking’ which allowed the tech giant to sync user data across devices and let them resume their work anywhere, anytime. In 2021, the company announced it was retiring Timeline, but the Activity Tracking feature is still enabled by default.

Disable Windows Activity Tracking

1. To disable the ‘Activity Tracking’ on Windows 10 and Windows 11, open the Settings app.

2. If you are using Windows 10, click on ‘Privacy’. For those on Windows 11, heading over to the ‘Privacy and Security’ section should do the trick.

3. From the left pane, find and click on ‘Activity History’.

4. Now, untick the ‘Store my activity on this device’ option along with the ‘Show activities from these accounts’.

If you want Windows to forget your activity history, click on the ‘Clear’ button beneath the ‘Clear activity history’ section and you are good to go.

For those wondering, disabling the activity history on Windows won’t have any downsides since the feature was designed for the Timeline feature, which was deprecated almost 3 years ago.

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/techook/how-to-disable-windows-activity-tracking-feature-9390591/