Your operating system has decided to remember everything you do. We have notes.

When the major desktop OS vendor announced its photographic memory feature in 2024, the security press took roughly four hours to find the problems. The screenshots were stored locally, but unencrypted at rest. Any process running as the user could read them. Any malicious browser extension. Any helpful synced cloud backup. Anything attached to the device for forensic recovery, ever.

The vendor patched. The feature was opted out by default in some markets. The criticism continued. What didn’t change was the underlying premise: that an operating system’s job, increasingly, includes building an AI-readable record of everything you ever did with your computer, so an AI can be helpful about it later.

The pitch was reasonable. “What was that document I was reading on Tuesday?” is a real problem. Asking your computer in plain English to find it is a real benefit. The mistake wasn’t the feature. It was the assumption that the corpus of “everything you’ve ever done” should sit on a device that’s also running browser extensions, syncing to a cloud account, and occasionally being plugged into the airport courtesy charger.

The other mistake, less discussed, is what happens to that corpus when the device leaves the person’s hands. Bring-your-own-device programs. Enterprise wipe events. Subpoenas. Refurbishments. The corpus has to be either trusted (it isn’t) or carefully managed (it usually isn’t) for the feature to be safe at scale.