It was killed by fear-mongering, a common cause of death for new technologies. (Remember the press fomenting a moral panic over Google Glass?) The idea is sound and will be part of our normal day-to-day computing experience in the future.
Right. Having a plain SQLite database with everything you do on your computer accessible to any program you or Microsoft run on your machine isn’t a problem at all? That open source utility you installed and forgot about that can now gleefully compile statistics on your porn usage and threaten you to send them to your spouse, whose email address and phone number it was able to pull from that same database, unless you pay a few bitcoins-that isn’t an issue at all? The fact that this was enabled for professional users handling your patient records, insurance details, personal finance, or your stock trades and make all that available at a whim, that is nitpicking? The TLS-encrypted API calls Windows computers make to Microsoft servers multiple times per day, any of which could include data from that database as anyone at Microsoft sees fit, they are paranoia?
> Right. Having a plain SQLite database with everything you do on your computer accessible to any program you or Microsoft run on your machine isn’t a problem at all?
We're way beyond the days when every program you run has equal access to all your data. These days, different programs have different levels of data access.
Are we, though? If I run an application as a normal user on Windows, it will run with my user account's privileges. And even if Microsoft put special care into the permissions on the database file—it's not like your typical Windows user wouldn't carelessly accept any UAC dialog they are presented with…
There was no fear mongering involved. Google Glass was an objective privacy nightmare just like Recall and in fact not just to the user, which could theoretically be defended as choice, but importantly to others.
You're basically exporting surveillance as an externality with recording technologies that by design collect everything around them. These technologies were basically multi-modal keyloggers.
