Lawsuit claims AI service Otter secretly records private chats : NPR

A federal lawsuit seeking class-action status accuses Otter.ai of “deceptively and surreptitiously” recording private conversations that the tech company uses to train its popular transcription service without permission from the people using it.

The company’s AI-powered transcription service called Otter Notebook, which can do real-time transcriptions of Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams meetings, by default does not ask meeting attendees for permission to record and fails to alert participants that recordings are shared with Otter to improve its artificial intelligence systems, according to the suit filed on Friday.

The plaintiff in the suit is a man named Justin Brewer of San Jacinto, Calif., who alleges his privacy was “severely invaded” upon realizing Otter was secretly recording a confidential conversation.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Otter’s covert recording violates state and federal privacy and wiretap laws. It seeks to represent others in California who have had chats unknowingly shared with Otter, which the lawyers contend Otter does to “derive financial gain.”

Neither Brewer’s legal team nor a spokesperson for Otter returned requests for comment.

Otter’s privacy policy does not hide the AI training. It says it receives “explicit permission” from users to train its systems on meeting transcripts when users check a box granting Otter and third parties to ingest the private conversations “for training and product improvement purposes,” but the lawsuit maintains many are still being duped.

In recent months, new privacy questions have dogged Otter as it has become increasingly deployed in workplaces around the world.

Some 25 million people now use its AI transcription tools, which have recorded and processed more than 1 billion meetings since the company was founded in 2016, the company says.

Users have shared horror stories on platforms such as X and Reddit about Otter’s automated recording tools backfiring.

Last year, an AI researcher and engineer said Otter had recorded a Zoom meeting with investors, then shared with him a transcription of the chat including “intimate, confidential details” about a business discussed after he had left the meeting. Those portions of the conversation ended up killing a deal, The Washington Post reported.

Politico’s China correspondent has written about interviewing a Uyghur human rights activist using Otter and realizing that the company shares user data with third parties, raising fears over the possibility that the Chinese government could attempt to access raw transcriptions of conversations with dissidents. Otter has said it does not share any data with foreign governments or law enforcement agencies.

On Reddit, users have complained about Otter joining meetings automatically when the service is linked to workplace calendars and recording chats without consent.

It’s a phenomenon also highlighted by the lawsuit. If someone has an Otter account and joins a virtual meeting, the software will typically ask the meeting’s host for permission to record, but it does not by default ask all the other participants.

“In fact, if the meeting host is an Otter accountholder who has integrated their relevant Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams accounts with Otter, an Otter Notetaker may join the meeting without obtaining the affirmative consent from any meeting participant, including the host,” the lawsuit alleges. “What Otter has done is use its Otter Notetaker meeting assistant to record, transcribe, and utilize the contents of conversations without the Class members’ informed consent.”

Otter claims that before the audio of meetings is fed into its machine learning systems to help improve an AI speech recognition feature, it is “de-identified,” a method by which data can be anonymized.

Yet the suit filed on Friday raises concerns about Otter’s ability to do this effectively, saying the company provides no public explanation of its “de-identifying” process.

“Upon information and belief, Otter’s deidentification process does not remove confidential information or guarantee speaker anonymity,” the lawsuit argues.