Nothing to see here: Brave browser blocks privacy-busting Microsoft Recall – Source: go.theregister.com

In an effort to protect user privacy, Brave browser 1.81 will prevent Microsoft Recall from screenshotting it by default.

Microsoft introduced Recall, you may recall, in May 2024 as a way to record screen activity for people using Copilot+ PCs, in order to pass that information to the resident AI model. The feature repeatedly captures images of the user’s screen and stories the snapshots, so the data can be resurfaced on-demand via local image recognition software and natural language queries.

Forgot the name of the website you visited which had a pic of blue shoes on it? Recall will find it for you.

After its debut, critics savaged the feature as a privacy nightmare. Microsoft ended up delaying the technology and making some adjustments to make it more acceptable.

In April 2025, Microsoft announced the Recall would be available to those on the company’s Windows Insider channel via a preview version of Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 for Copilot+ PCs. Originally offered on an opt-out basis, Recall is now opt-in and has new local data protections it didn’t have in its first iteration.

Brave Software, which offers a Chromium-based browser tricked out with extra privacy controls, argues that Recall still presents a risk, even if transitioning it from opt-out to opt-in has mitigated concerns.

“Recall is antithetical to Brave’s goals as a privacy-first browser, and as such we should disable Recall’s ability to capture what the user does on Brave,” explained Shivan Kaul Sahib, VP of privacy and security at Brave Software, in the initial GitHub Issue post outlining the browser code change.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Sahib argued that disabling Recall by default in all Brave tabs is necessary to protect the user’s browsing history.

“We think it’s vital that your browsing activity on Brave does not accidentally end up in a persistent database, which is especially ripe for abuse in highly-privacy-sensitive cases such as intimate partner violence,” he wrote.

If you want Recall to screenshot Brave, the browser’s settings menu allows you to override the block.

According to Sahib, Brave’s implementation was inspired by secure messaging app Signal, which instituted a Recall block in May. Signal Desktop for Windows 11 includes a default Screen Security setting that tells the operating system that messages are protected with digital rights management (DRM), thereby blocking any and all screenshots from being taken – including the automated screenshots Recall uses.

“The integration of AI agents with pervasive permissions, questionable security hygiene, and an insatiable hunger for data has the potential to break the blood-brain barrier between applications and operating systems,” wrote Signal developer Joshua Lund at the time. “This poses a significant threat to Signal, and to every privacy-preserving application in general.”

Sahib maintains that Brave’s approach is better because Signal’s reliance on the Windows DRM flag disables all screenshots, including those taken by accessibility software like screen readers. Brave, on the other hand, only blocks browser screenshots initiated by Recall.

Redmond on Tuesday doubled down on its AI shoulder-surfing gambit by introducing Copilot Vision, an opt-in extension of Recall that streams captured screenshots back to Microsoft’s servers, where user activity data can be processed by more capable AI models.

“We currently don’t have plans regarding Copilot Vision but are looking into this,” a spokesperson for Brave told The Register. “We prioritized blocking Recall because it had a history of bad security and privacy decisions.”

Brave 1.81 is scheduled to be released on August 5, 2025. ®