HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Otter.ai Notetaker Allegedly Recorded Meeting Conversations Without Participants' Informed Consent and Used Data for AI Training

February 24, 2025

In February 2025, Otter.ai's Notetaker reportedly recorded and transcribed a Zoom conversation involving Justin Brewer, a San Jacinto, California resident who was not an Otter account holder, without his informed consent. Brewer later alleged that Otter obtained and retained his meeting communications and used captured data to train its speech-recognition and machine-learning systems. This incident raises concerns about responsible AI practices and the need for explicit user consent in audio recording technologies. Through contributors—JOIN US—to learn more about the impact of AI on privacy and governance, and how we can work towards safer and more trustworthy AI systems.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
otter.ai-users, otter.ai, ai-transcription-tool-users
Alleged developer
otter.ai, ai-transcription-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
privacy, people-recorded-without-consent, otter.ai-users, justin-brewer, employees

AI governance case studies

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1650

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.