Otter.ai continued for allegedly recorded work calls without consent

Otter.ai, the manufacturer of transcription tools and taking notes supplied by AI, faces a collective appeal in California for alleged privacy violations.

The prosecution, filed Friday before the Federal Court by the resident of San Jacinto, Justin Brewer, says that Totter has recorded private conversations without obtaining the consent of all the participants of all the calls, then uses these recordings to form his AI. According to the complaint, Brewer did not have an Otter account but joined a zoom meeting in February where the Otter notaker software from the company was running. He said that he had no idea that the service would capture and store his data or that the call would be used to form models of voice recognition and OTTER automatic learning.

The trial specifically targets Otter Notetaker, the company of the company that records and transcribes Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls in real time.

Normally, if someone with an Otter account joins a virtual meeting, the software asks the host for authorization to record the call, but it does not automatically check with everyone in the call. The trial also claims that if the host joined Otter with his Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft accounts, an Otter Notetaker Bot can slip into the meeting without obtaining the explicit consent of anyone on the call, not even the host.

“C, above all, Otter does not obtain the prior, express or otherwise consent, of people who attend meetings when the Notailer Otter is activated, before the recording, access, reading and learning of the content of conversations between Otter accountants and other participants in meetings”, explains the complaint, reported for the first time by NPR. According to the pursuit, this violates the laws on electronic listening and the confidentiality of states and federals.

He also alleys that user conversations are used to train OTTER AI models for the “financial benefit” of the company.

“Although we were examining the question, it is important to note that Otter does not initiate the recordings.

The trial rejected this argument, accusing Otter of dodging responsibility by transferring its legal obligations to its account holders.

Otter.a was founded in 2016 as an asense and has since reached more than 25 million users and has exceeded $ 100 million in annual recurring income. But even before this trial, users already expressed concerns.

In one case last year, an AI researcher said that Totter had recorded a zoom call with investors and then sent him a transcription which included “intimate and confidential details” discussed after having already left the meeting.

Politico also indicated that his Chinese correspondent would have discovered that Otter shares user data with third parties after using the service during an interview with an Uighur activist.