OpenAI’s Chronicle mirrors Microsoft Recall’s privacy concerns

OpenAI has introduced Chronicle, an opt-in research preview for its Codex agent designed to capture user screens for contextual information. This feature draws parallels to Microsoft's controversial Recall feature, which faced significant backlash for its data collection methods. Chronicle aims to provide Codex with a richer understanding of user activity, reducing the need for users to restate context, as reported by The Register.

Chronicle functions by taking screenshots of the user's screen and feeding them to OpenAI's Codex agent to augment its memory with contextual data. This approach mirrors Microsoft's Recall, which also captured screenshots. However, OpenAI's implementation is opt-in and currently limited to the Codex app for macOS.

The company acknowledges risks, including rapid rate limit usage, increased susceptibility to prompt injection, and unencrypted local storage of memories for up to six hours. While screen captures are temporary, the OCR-derived text stored in "memories" persists until deleted and could potentially be accessed by other programs or shared with OpenAI through prompts.

Source: The Register