Justin Lam, senior research analyst covering information security at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said that tackling security and privacy risks is common practice for businesses and shouldn’t necessarily preclude the use of tools shown to provide benefits to users and businesses. “Enterprises face challenges to balance user privacy, user productivity, internal risk management, surveillance, and compliance,” he said. “That said, they should also consider what aggregate individual productivity gains there can be from tools like Recall and Copilot.”

Others, however, warned that businesses should avoid using the feature at all.

“While the ability to search your usage history can provide a time saving and production increase, I advise the risk to small businesses to use this feature is too great,” said McKee at SonicWall.

“First and foremost: if you can, don’t enable it,” said Forrester’s Pollard. “I would want it eliminated via group policy if available. If the feature is activated at any point, I would also want telemetry informing me it’s activated so that I can figure out if a user intended to activate it or if an adversary did [so] as part of their data gathering efforts.”