AI Meeting Notetaker Privacy: Who Agreed to Be Recorded?

AI meeting notetaker privacy comes down to a question that tends to go unasked in the meeting itself, which is who present agreed to any of this. In July 2026 someone on r/sales described the moment that makes it concrete: a manager produced a summary of more than 250 words, in under three minutes, from a thirty-minute call that had not been scripted in advance, complete with key takeaways and action items. Nothing had been recorded as far as anyone on the call could tell. The post asked the obvious question: “Is everybody just paying for Otter or another ai note service and I’m the schmuck taking actual notes?”

The interesting part is not that the tools exist. It is that at least one vendor has already written down who is responsible for asking the room, and it is not the vendor.

AI meeting notetaker privacy, in the vendors’ own words

Otter’s privacy policy lists the categories of data it holds. One of them is labelled, in Otter’s own disclosure table, “Speaker Identification / Biometric Information”.

The policy explains what that means: “When you use the Services, you may record and annotate spoken conversations, such as calls or meetings, from which we generate speaker identification information. We use this information to help you recognize speakers in recorded conversations and automatically tag their name within the transcript.”

That is the feature working as advertised. Telling voices apart is the whole point of a notetaker that labels who said what. What the policy does not limit is whose voices it applies to, and a meeting contains people who have never opened the product.

Two other lines in the same policy are easy to skim past. Otter’s stated purpose for processing includes “training our proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions (which may contain Personal Information)”. Read that carefully, because there are two different commitments in one sentence: the audio is described as de-identified, and the transcriptions are not. They are conceded to possibly contain personal information.

And the tool is not only listening. Under the information it collects automatically, Otter lists “screenshots/screen captures taken during the meeting”.

Otter asks the person who invited the notetaker to get permission

Here is the sentence the post is built around. It is in Otter’s privacy policy, under the heading about information you provide about others:

“If you provide an Audio Recording, this may contain the Personal Information of third parties. Before you do so, please make sure you have the necessary permissions from your co-workers, friends or other third parties before sharing Personal Information or referring them to us.”

Read it as an instruction, because that is what it is. The duty to obtain permission from the other people in the meeting belongs to the account holder. Not to Otter. If you are the one who switched the notetaker on, you are the one the policy is addressing.

It is a line that lives in a privacy policy rather than in the product, which is to say it is not where anyone switching on a notetaker would encounter it.

A court has now ruled on part of this

In August 2025 a California resident filed a class action against Otter.ai in the Northern District of California, case number 5:25-cv-06911. It was consolidated with three similar suits. On 13 August 2026, Judge Eumi K. Lee issued an order titled “ORDER GRANTING MOTION TO DISMISS IN PART”. Several counts were dismissed with leave to amend, and then: “The motion is DENIED in all other respects.”

Be careful about what that means. An order on a motion to dismiss decides whether claims may proceed, not whether they are true. No liability has been found. What survived is still a set of allegations, now allowed to go forward.

The reasoning is the part to read closely, because it turns a privacy-policy detail into something with consequences. Otter argued its notetaker was simply the host’s own recording tool. The court accepted the general principle, writing that “software providers acting only as an extension of a user or client are not considered third-party interceptors”. Then it drew the line:

“However, Plaintiffs allege that Otter does not solely act on behalf of users who choose to deploy the Otter Notetaker. Instead, Plaintiffs allege that Otter also retains their conversational data and uses it to improve its machine-learning models and services. … Software providers may qualify as third-party interceptors under these circumstances.”

Read that next to the training clause quoted earlier. A notetaker that only works for the customer who switched it on sits in one legal category. One that also keeps the material to train its own models may sit in another. Whether a vendor trains on your meetings stops being a preference at that point.

The court also names the statutes in play, and the list is wider than the original complaint: alongside the California claims it includes “the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (“BIPA”)” and “the Washington Privacy Act”. Plaintiffs were given fourteen days to amend, so the pleadings are not final either.

The allegations below are from the operative complaint, and most of them survived the motion. They remain allegations. They are also the most useful part for a reader, because each one describes product behaviour you can go and check against your own account.

The complaint alleges that when the notetaker joins, “it will ask for consent to join and record the meeting from the meeting host if the meeting host is not an Otter accountholder. However, it does not seek consent to join the meeting from any other meeting participant.” It further alleges that “nor does it permit any other participant, besides the meeting host, to disable use of the Otter Notetaker during the meeting.”

On defaults, the complaint alleges that “when default account settings are used, Otter does not send a pre-meeting invitation or notification to obtain consent from meeting participants. Instead, Otter accountholders must toggle this setting ‘On’.”

I tried to test that allegation against my own experience and could not. I use none of the products named in this post, so there is no settings screen of mine to show you. Asked whether I have ever sat in a call where somebody else’s notetaker was running, the honest answer is that I do not know. Probably not, I think. I could not tell you either way.

That is a strange thing to be uncertain about. Being recorded by a company you have no relationship with is the sort of detail you would expect to remember. Two explanations fit equally well: it has not happened to me, or it has and there was nothing about it to remember. If the allegation above is accurate, the second explanation leaves nothing behind to check a memory against, which is also why it would be hard for anyone to notice a pattern.

The plaintiff’s characterisation of the policy language quoted above is that “Otter tries to shift responsibility, outsourcing its legal obligations to its accountholders, rather than seeking permission and consent from the individuals Otter records, as required by law.” Whether that is legally correct is what the court will decide. That the policy text says what it says is not in dispute; it is on Otter’s website.

One detail in the complaint is useful whatever happens to the case. It alleges that a competitor, Read.ai, “permits any conversation participant, including those who do not use Read.ai, to stop recording during a meeting.” If that is accurate, and this post has not independently confirmed it, then letting a non-customer stop the recording is a product decision somebody made rather than a technical impossibility.

Two notetakers, two different promises about your meeting

The useful exercise is not picking a winner. It is noticing that the documents differ, and that both say something narrower than a quick read suggests.

	Otter	Fireflies	Google Meet “Take notes for me”
Voice data	Names “Speaker Identification / Biometric Information” as a category it holds	Says service providers may generate “Voice Data”, which “may be considered ‘biometric identifiers'” in some places	Not described in these terms
Model training	Trains on de-identified audio and on transcriptions that “may contain Personal Information”	Meeting content not “used for training internal or external AI models”	Governed by Workspace terms
Where it lands	Otter’s service	Fireflies’ service	“the meeting organizer’s Google Drive”
Who can stop it	Complaint alleges only the host	Not examined here	Organizer and internal participants; with “Quick Stop” enabled and host controls off, an internal user can stop it for everyone
Participant notice	Not described in the policy	Not described in the policy	Prompt with “Continue” or “Leave” when a feature is turned on

Two of those cells deserve a second look.

Fireflies states a Zero Data Retention policy for meeting content, which sounds like the strongest commitment on the page. The definition is three clauses: content is not “(1) stored by any third-party vendor after processing; (2) accessed by any third-party vendor once the service is completed; or (3) used for training internal or external AI models.”

Now try to answer one question from that paragraph: does Fireflies itself retain your meeting content?

The umbrella sentence says a Zero Data Retention policy applies to meeting content, which reads as a general commitment. The definition that follows names “any third-party vendor” in two of its three clauses, and only the training clause is unqualified. A reader who weights the umbrella and a reader who weights the enumeration will come away with different answers, and both are reading the same paragraph honestly. Elsewhere the policy says Fireflies stores “other personal information for as long as necessary to carry out the purposes for which we originally collected it”, without saying whether meeting content sits inside that category.

I am not going to tell you which reading is right, because the document does not settle it. That is the finding. How to safely upload company data to AI covers the general habit of reading these clauses for exactly what they cover, and this is a good specimen: the strongest-sounding sentence on the page is the one that needs a follow-up question to the vendor.

Fireflies’ voice-data paragraph works the same way, and in its favour. It concedes the biometric question rather than ducking it, then states two real limits: providers “do not use Voice Data to identify or authenticate individuals”, and Fireflies “never receive or process this information on our own servers”. Those limits are the substance. Quote them or quote nothing.

The Google Meet line is different in kind, and better than I first gave it credit for. Google documents a prompt shown when a feature is switched on: “To stay in a meeting after a feature is turned on, click Continue. If you want to exit the meeting, click Leave.” That is notice plus an exit, which is more than the third-party policies describe.

Stopping it is narrower. Google says “the meeting organizer and participants internal to the host’s organization can start or stop notes”, and adds one conditional path: “If the admin has enabled ‘Quick Stop’ and host controls are off, to end the capture for all participants, an internal user can click Stop.” Two conditions, and still an internal user. Google does not write that an external guest cannot stop it; it writes who can, and an external guest is not on the list.

Where it lands is the other difference. The notes document “is saved in the meeting organizer’s Google Drive”. A nine-person meeting’s transcript sitting in one colleague’s Drive is inside your own tenant rather than a vendor’s, which is a different risk profile and not an absence of one. Google is also careful to separate visibility from access: external guests “can see that the calendar event contains an attachment”, and “the ability to see the document attached to the calendar invite does not mean they have access to the document.”

What a 100-comment thread got wrong about meeting transcripts

The r/sales thread ran to 100 comments and 87 votes. The top reply, at 54 points, was this:

“Zoom has a new feature called ‘note taker’ that doesn’t technically ‘record’ the audio but it transcribes the call in real time. There is zero indication to anyone on the call that this is happening.”

The feature is real and it is called My Notes. Zoom describes it as personal note-taking that can be enhanced with a transcript, and confirms the part that sounds least likely: the resulting notes “are yours and are not automatically shared with the meeting or webinar host or other meeting or webinar participants.” So a colleague can sit in your call building a transcript that nothing obliges them to show you.

The “zero indication” half is where the comment splits in two, along a line it does not draw. It matters a great deal which meeting you are picturing.

In a Zoom meeting, there is indication. The host has to permit participant transcription in the first place, and once someone starts, Zoom documents two visible signals: the My Notes and Transcription icons switch on in the meeting notifications at the top right, and in the Participants panel the My Notes icon appears next to that person’s display name. A participant who would rather it stopped can click Ask host to stop transcription. The host’s two options at that point are Stop and Decline. Zoom also attaches a client-version condition to the management side of this, which is the kind of detail that decides whether a control exists on the day you reach for it.

Outside Zoom, the picture inverts. My Notes runs against a Teams, Slack or Chrome call using “the system and microphone audio on the device”, and what Zoom provides there is not an icon but an instruction to the person taking the notes: “make sure you follow all applicable laws when transcribing conversations, which may include providing notice.” That sentence appears three times on the page. Telling the note-taker to give notice is a reasonable thing for a vendor to do. It is also an acknowledgement of who is not giving it. One more line from the same warning deserves a place in your head before the next call: “using the mute button in a third-party app or browser during a virtual meeting will not prevent My Notes from transcribing audio detected by the device microphone.”

So the most upvoted answer in the biggest discussion I could find is wrong about what happens inside Zoom, and outside Zoom the documentation does not answer it either way. What Zoom does there is hand the duty to the note-taker. Whether it gets discharged is not a product behaviour at all, which is the less comfortable answer: fifty-four people upvoted a question about software when the variable was a colleague.

I have no standing to make that a criticism. The paragraph you are reading was, until this week, an admission that Zoom’s support article had not loaded when I tried it, left in the post as a shrug. It loaded on the second attempt, eight days later. And the first version of this post stated that no court had ruled in the Otter case: a reader checked, and sent me the order of 13 August 2026, public for a month by then. I had read a search result describing the May hearing, taken it for the present, and written a paragraph about other people not checking things. The section above is corrected. The lesson is cheaper to learn from me than from your own meeting.

Elsewhere in the same thread someone arrives at the working assumption that follows from all this: “Yes, everyone is running one now. Otter, Fathom, Plaud, the phone-in-the-pocket ones… Assume every call is being captured.”

There is a counter-current too, and it is recent. A thread posted on 9 September 2026 asks about companies that “don’t allow the AI bot to join the call because it looks like a security/compliance risk.” Neither the assumption nor the ban is a measurement. Together they describe an unsettled situation where two organisations can reach opposite policies from the same facts.

Questions to settle before the next notetaker joins

This site usually ends with what to check. Here the first item is different, because for once the reader is not the person at risk.

Decide who tells the room, and when. Otter’s policy assigns that job to you. Whether or not the law in your jurisdiction agrees, the vendor has written down its expectation, and saying it out loud at the start of a call costs nothing.
Find the notification setting and look at whether it is on. The allegation worth checking against your own account is the one about defaults. If a pre-meeting notification exists and is off, that is a decision that was made for you.
Ask where the transcript lands, not just whether it is kept. A vendor’s service, your own Drive, and one colleague’s personal Drive are three different answers with three different consequences, and all three are in the table above.
Read the training clause for what it excludes. “De-identified audio” and “transcriptions which may contain Personal Information” appear in the same sentence in Otter’s policy and carry different commitments.
Check what happens for external guests specifically. In Google Meet, starting and stopping the notes is limited to the organizer and people internal to the host’s organisation. The customer on the call is not one of them.

None of that requires a legal opinion, and none of it is about picking a safer product. It is about knowing which of these answers applies to the meeting you are about to start.

FAQ

Can my employer see the AI transcript of a meeting I was in?

It depends where the transcript is stored, which is a different question from who was in the meeting. With Google Meet’s built-in notetaker the document goes to the organizer’s Google Drive, so the question becomes who can reach that person’s Drive. With a third-party tool the transcript lives in that vendor’s service under the account holder’s login. Ask which product was used before assuming either answer.

Do I have to tell people an AI notetaker is running?

The legal answer depends on where everyone is sitting, and this is not legal advice. What is documented is that Otter’s privacy policy asks account holders to “make sure you have the necessary permissions from your co-workers, friends or other third parties” before providing a recording. The vendor has stated its expectation of you in writing, whatever your local rules add on top.

Is a meeting transcript used to train the AI?

It varies by product, and the wording rewards close reading. Otter’s policy describes training on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions that may contain personal information. Fireflies states that meeting content is not used for training internal or external AI models. Two vendors, two different commitments, both in their own policies.

Can I stop a notetaker that someone else turned on?

Often not. Google documents that the organizer and participants internal to the host’s organization can start or stop its notes, which leaves external guests without that control. The Otter complaint alleges no participant besides the host can disable its notetaker mid-meeting. Leaving the meeting, or asking the host directly, may be the only levers you have.

What is the Otter lawsuit about?

A 2025 class action in the Northern District of California alleging that Otter’s notetaker records and transcribes people who never consented, and uses that material to train its models. On 13 August 2026 the court granted Otter’s motion to dismiss in part and denied it “in all other respects”, so most of the case proceeds. That is a ruling on whether the claims may be heard, not a finding that Otter did anything wrong, and the plaintiffs were given leave to amend the rest.

Sources

This post describes published privacy policies and a pending lawsuit. It is not legal advice, and the author is not a lawyer. Statements drawn from the complaint are unproven allegations. The order of 13 August 2026 dismissed several counts with leave to amend and denied the motion in all other respects; it decides what may be litigated, not who is right, and no liability has been found. Vendor policy language was read in September 2026 and can change without notice. Zoom’s My Notes behaviour is taken from Zoom’s own support documentation, read on 23 September 2026, and not from testing the product. Microsoft Teams and Read.ai behaviour was not independently verified and those products appear only where another source is quoted describing them.

Written by Grace

I test AI tools and agents in my own workflow, and write down what I find, including the settings that surprised me. About Grace and how posts are verified