Class-action suit claims Otter AI records private work conversations

Summary

Otter.ai is a Mountain View, Calif.-based tech company that uses artificial intelligence to generate speech-to-text transcriptions. It has become a popular tool for transcribing virtual office meetings. Source: Otter hide caption toggle caption Source: Otter 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...