Otter.ai, the maker of AI-powered transcription and note-taking tools, is facing a class-action lawsuit in California over alleged privacy violations.
The suit, filed Friday in federal court by San Jacinto resident Justin Brewer, claims that Otter.ai is recording private conversations without obtaining consent from all the calls’ participants and then uses those recordings to train its AI. According to the complaint, Brewer doesn’t have an Otter account but joined a Zoom meeting in February where the company’s Otter Notetaker software was running. He says he had no idea the service would capture and store his data or that the call would be used to train Otter’s speech recognition and machine learning models.
The lawsuit specifically targets Otter Notetaker, the company’s tool 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 permission to record the call, but it doesn’t automatically check with everyone else in the call. The lawsuit also claims that if the host has integrated Otter with their Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams accounts, an Otter Notetaker bot can slip into the meeting without getting explicit consent from anyone on the call, not even the host.
“Crucially, Otter does not obtain prior consent, express or otherwise, of persons who attend meetings where the Otter Notetaker is enabled, prior to Otter recording, accessing, reading, and learning the contents of conversations between Otter accountholders and other meeting participants,” says the complaint, first reported by NPR. According to the suit, this violates state and federal wiretap and privacy laws.
It also alleges that users’ conversations are being used to train Otter’s AI models for the “financial benefit” of the company.
“While we are reviewing the matter, it is important to note that Otter does not initiate recordings on its own. Recording only occurs when initiated by an Otter user, and our Terms of Service make clear that users are responsible for obtaining any necessary permissions before doing so,” a representative from Otter.ai told Gizmodo in an emailed statement.
The lawsuit pushed back against that argument, accusing Otter of dodging responsibility by shifting its legal obligations onto its account holders.
Otter.ai was founded in 2016 as AISense and has since grown to more than 25 million users and surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. But even before this lawsuit, users were already voicing concerns.
In one case last year, an AI researcher said Otter recorded a Zoom call with investors and later sent him a transcript that included “intimate, confidential details” discussed after he had already left the meeting.
Politico also reported that its China correspondent reportedly discovered that Otter shares user data with third parties after using the service during an interview with a Uyghur activist.
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