For those who don't know, Microsoft Recall is a system that screenshots what you do every few seconds, and uses OpenAI's vision api to allow search on eveything you did in the past. There's an article from Sep 27th where they promise you'll be able to uninstall Recall: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/27/24255721/microsoft-window... , not sure what that means for this explorer.exe dependency.
It is plausible MS is taking marching orders from a higher power, off the record.
No, that scheme would be too hard to contain so the three letter agencies are blatant about it. They just let tech companies develop these things and know they'll have access to the data anyway.
For every real user that finds a tool slurping up data to be useful, there are 100 law enforcement agents also saying it's useful so everyone should hop on the bandwagon.