Lawsuit against Otter AI claims it records meetings without consent

Transcription tool Otter AI has long had an “assistant” service to transcribe video meetings. “Otter Notetaker” can enter a Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams call and jot down what participants are saying in real-time. Now, a class action lawsuit filed Friday claims Otter’s Notetaker doesn’t just record people who want the recordings, but also those who haven’t subscribed to its services or consented to being recorded.

Not only that, but the suit states that Otter doesn’t disclose to those who set up Otter Notetaker that the transcriptions are used to train Otter’s automatic speech recognition and machine learning models.

California resident Justin Brewer is filing this lawsuit on behalf of himself and other Californians and Americans, saying Otter intercepted his conversations. The suit claims Otter violates both federal and California law, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and the California Invasion of Privacy Act.

The suit states that Brewer doesn’t have an Otter account but participated in a Zoom meeting in February where Otter Notetaker was used. He wasn’t aware that Otter would obtain and keep that data and wasn’t informed that the service would use this data to train its speech recognition and machine learning tools. Brewer didn’t consent to this and “had his privacy severely invaded and been exposed to the risk and harmful conditions created by Otter’s violations of federal and California law,” the suit reads.

Otter’s privacy policy states that it trains its AI technology on “de-identified” audio recordings. It also says it gains explicit permission to access the conversation for training, yet the suit claims that Otter Notetaker asks for consent to join and record a meeting from the meeting host (if the host doesn’t have an Otter account). It doesn’t ask to join the meeting from any other participant, nor does it allow anyone but the meeting host to disable Otter Notetaker, according to the filing.

Mashable has reached out to Otter for comment.