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New Software Remembers Everything Your Computer Has Ever Displayed (cnn.com)
A Napster co-founder launched a new software this week which lets you search for anything you've ever looked at on your computer. schwit1 shared this report from CNNMoney:
Atlas Informatics Founder and CEO Jordan Ritter calls the software "a photographic memory for your digital life"... This includes web pages, emails, Slack chats, Netflix films, Spotify songs, or anything else that's appeared in front of your eyes on your screen... You can search by keyword, content type or time, and it displays all related information based on relevancy. For instance, if two documents were open at the same time and you toggled between them, they will both appear whether or not they contain a keyword. Once installed on your hard drive and browser, Atlas Recall runs in the background and begins collecting your activity. The company captures all the content you've looked at and stores it on its servers.
It's encrypted before transmission to the Atlas Cloud servers, though you can block it from capturing data from certain applications, files, and web sites. "The platform wars are over, nobody won, and no one will ever win them again..." Ritter told CNNMoney. "What we want is something that works the way we use our devices and data."
It's encrypted before transmission to the Atlas Cloud servers, though you can block it from capturing data from certain applications, files, and web sites. "The platform wars are over, nobody won, and no one will ever win them again..." Ritter told CNNMoney. "What we want is something that works the way we use our devices and data."
This is one of the cases where a lack of Linux support is a feature!
Check out their privacy page, where they eventually get around to admitting they have all your data forever.
https://www.atlas.co/privacy-p...
It starts with stuff like:
"
You retain ownership and control of your data.
You can review and remove your digital items from the system at anytime.
You control what the system remembers. You may temporarily pause the system or permanently block by URL, file, application, and more. This excluded content never leaves your computer or phone.
Each digital item remains encrypted at rest and in motion.
"
But what does that really mean? And "encrypted" is only really meaningful if YOU have the key, which obviously, you do not- all the services they offer require that they access your data, after all. When it says you can remove the "digital items", they don't mention if that also removes the DATA. If it were to upload a personal LibreOffice document, what meaning is "digital item"? Is that the combination of my data plus the identifier that lets me see it? Have they provided a legal need to purge the data when I remove the document, or are we just deleting the reference, while the data still chills there? Also note the "block list" is itself a massive deal: the blacklist is a list of things that you DO NOT want transferred. This means that they have a list of things you do not want transferred, should that ever be something that can be used against you, hey, there it is.
Can they snoop through your data? Here's what they say on that:
"however, we do not have access to the contents of the items (documents or files) remembered through Recall beyond the minimum required to operate Recall and its associated services"
Let me translate that: "we have access to the contents of the items (documents and files)". The clause on the back COMPLETELY ELIMINATES the statement on the front.
The "privacy promise" does not appear to be a legal document. I can't find their EULA anywhere, and I will bet ANYTHING that the EULA both (a) doesn't actually have the legal safeguards that would be required to render them liable for breaking their promise and (b) allows them to update the EULA at any goddamned time. Again, I can't find it.
As a note: I wonder what a secure version of this would actually look like. The searching would have to happen on your machine, or a machine you own, and the data could still pass through their server as long as it was encrypted with a key that the owner (you) know, and the server (they) do not. Pretty much every search and voice recognition is doing this crap now, and they never offer an option for someone who runs their own server. I'm sure this is all by design.
Anyway, the big thing is this: anyone who uses this program gets exactly what it looks like, and fully deserves whatever results occur as a result. It is offered as a feature, and anyone who opts in must presumably want this.