Google Pixel Screenshots App Isn’t a Privacy Nightmare Like the Microsoft Recall

Incoming slate of Pixel 9 phones as well as Pixel 9 Pro Fold I will up to their gills in AI features. In all the magic editor and Gemini mumbo jumbo, one AI skill that stands out is the app to save your screenshots. Pixel Screenshots is a special Google phone app that will let you search your screens with some AI help. After watching it in action, I see it as a simplified version of the Microsoft’s bad memory featureand the more the better.

My screenshots are like barnacles that have been tracked throughout my organized Google Photos app. I take screenshots as a way to capture all the events, notes, and receipts I need to remember. I can remove them from Photos, but that would mean I might miss something I’ll need later. Pixel Screenshots solves this problem by giving a specific app to search through my screenshots. The feature uses Gemini Nano to recognize text and understand images in the app. If I ask it to look up how much my friend owes me for drinks last night, it should be able to pull that information.

Google told Gizmodo the entire process runs on the device and doesn’t require any cloud-based work. Every time you take a screenshot, the app generates a title and a summary of the image. You can add a note to the screenshot to help AI-enhanced search find your content. Best of all, you can create categories for your various screenshots.

What makes Pixel screenshots different from Microsoft’s Recall?

While Microsoft shared details in the Recall for its first wave of Copilot+ PCs earlier this year, it created a wave of concern among privacy-conscious consumers. Others have been reluctant to buy a PC that, from then on, captures everything they do on their computer—including passwords and financial information—every few seconds and saves it to their hard drive. Microsoft removed the feature from the first release of Copilot+ after researchers discovered screenshots were easily accessible without any real layer of security.

Both Google and Microsoft say that all AI screenshot analysis happens on the device, whether it’s Recall or Pixel Screenshots. Google’s advantage is that users can choose what they capture and when. It also works with other Google apps. If it detects a date or location on the screenshot, I can press a button to add the location to Maps or the event to the calendar.

Recall should be an always-on memory device when you forget what you were searching for the other day. But that feature automatically eats up a negligible portion of your storage to fill it with unwanted screenshots. Microsoft promises that this feature won’t be enabled by default when they bring it to Copilot+, but I’d still be hesitant to enable it for fear of taking sensitive information while scrolling.

Pixel phones will still save your screenshots to Google Photos, at least for now. My photos are for experience, while my screenshots are useful as a tech journalist, so I’d like to keep them separate if possible. We’ll also have to use the app ourselves to give a full impression, but as it stands, it’s one of those features that makes much better use of AI than plain AI-generated text or random, plain AI art.