AI notetakers at work could leave companies at risk for lawsuits
AI note-taking applications are increasingly used by workers to record meetings, generate conversation summaries and suggest post-meeting action items. Along with the promised productivity benefits — enabling users to focus on meetings rather than actively taking notes — the emergence of these AI tools has raised privacy questions, particularly around obtaining prior consent by meeting…
AI notetaking applications have become popular for recording meetings and generating summaries. However, their use has raised privacy concerns, particularly around obtaining prior consent from meeting participants. This has led to lawsuits against software vendors selling AI notetaking tools. The main issue is obtaining consent and understanding how conversation data is handled, such as whether it's used to train vendor AI models or create biometric voiceprints.
These practices have been considered in US courts. Otter, with 35 million users, faced a class-action complaint accusing it of recording individuals without consent and using their voices for training AI tools. Fireflies, with over 20 million customers, was sued for collecting and storing biometric voiceprints without consent, violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
Microsoft has also faced a class-action complaint alleging its Teams app's live transcription feature violates privacy laws by collecting biometric data without consent. Another lawsuit claims startup Granola used its product without all meeting participants' knowledge, violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. These cases highlight the need for businesses to consider consent and data handling when using AI notetaking apps.
Written by urgent.news from Computerworld's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
