Recordings
Otter.ai sent out investors' private discussion after a call
In September 2024 an AI note-taker kept recording after a video call ended, and a participant was emailed a transcript of the investors' confidential discussion afterwards. A class action against Otter.ai followed.
In September 2024 a machine-learning engineer had a Zoom meeting with a venture capital firm. The call was recorded by Otter.ai's AI note-taker. A few minutes after it ended, Otter emailed the transcript to everyone on the invitation, including the engineer. But the transcript did not stop at the end of the call: the note-taker had kept recording, and it included several hours of the investors' internal conversation afterwards.
According to the engineer, in that conversation the investors discussed strategic failures and massaged metrics. He told them; they apologised, but he still walked away from the deal. His post about it was viewed more than five million times. Otter said it takes privacy seriously and that users have full control over sharing permissions.
In August 2025 a class action was filed against Otter in a federal court in California; several similar suits were later consolidated. The plaintiffs claim that Otter's note-taker joins meetings as a silent participant without asking every participant for consent. They also claim that the company trains its speech recognition models on the conversations, and that its de-identification does not remove confidential details. One plaintiff says a deeply personal Zoom conversation with a medical professional was recorded this way.
Otter asked for the suit to be dismissed. On 13 August 2026 the court dismissed some of the claims, but those under the federal wiretap law and the California privacy law can go ahead. This does not mean Otter broke the law, only that the case can continue.
What can we learn from it?
An AI note-taker records what it hears and, if the settings say so, sends it to everyone; it cannot tell what belongs to the meeting. Automatic notes can be a real help, as long as we decide when they run and who receives them. In Confiella the recording does not leave the computer, the transcript is made locally, and nothing goes out by itself: review before sending is mandatory. With a cloud note-taker, it is worth turning off automatic joining and automatic sending, and telling participants about the recording in advance.
Sources
- U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California: In re Otter.ai Privacy Litigation, Order Granting Motion to Dismiss in Part
- NPR: Class-action suit claims Otter AI secretly records private work conversations
- UC Today: When the Meeting Ended, Otter Kept Listening
This article is based on the public sources listed. If you find a mistake, write to us: [email protected]