Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 191 posts

Re: Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

#121

Post by that_guy_iain »

handoflixue wrote: post #119
that_guy_iain wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be in breach. otherwise, you sending an email with someone's email/phone number via gmail in it would cause Google to breach it. That would be on the software user. If you use somewhere that to breach GDPR, the software provider is not liable for how the user uses it.

If the software is transcribing and sending emails without the user's awareness, much less permission... then the responsibility must rest with the software. Software isn't responsible for my deliberate decisions, but it is responsible for anything it does without consulting me.

That isn't going to fly is it? I didn't know this software did this when configured in this way isn't really something that moves the liability.

Re: Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

#122

Post by TylerE »

croes wrote: post #33
bombcar wrote: post #23

The big names provide recording and transcription now - Zoom has it, Teams has it (Teams apparently does it realtime and live and it's not bad, great for the deaf!). I suppose those are part of paid plans, and they trigger the "your shit is being recorded, dude." warnings.

Don't the need the permission of all participants to transcribe?

Depends on the jurisdiction. In many states you only need 1st party consent to record a call. If you're ON the call (as opposed to say, wire taping it...) you're your own first party.

Re: Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

#123

Post by pbhjpbhj »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #109
Etheryte wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the bot transcribes anything GDPR considers personal data and then emails it out you're already in breach. Simply someone telling their phone number to another participant over the call would result in a violation.

It wouldn't be in breach. otherwise, you sending an email with someone's email/phone number via gmail in it would cause Google to breach it. That would be on the software user. If you use somewhere that to breach GDPR, the software provider is not liable for how the user uses it.

If you made a draft email with those details, then GMail sent that draft without your authority then they too would be in breach, albeit unwittingly. That seems like a reasonable analogy to what happened in the OP, assuming it was a bug and not some 'growth hacking' plan as others have speculated.

Re: Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

#124

Post by dspillett »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #109
Etheryte wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the bot transcribes anything GDPR considers personal data and then emails it out you're already in breach. Simply someone telling their phone number to another participant over the call would result in a violation.

It wouldn't be in breach. otherwise, you sending an email with someone's email/phone number via gmail in it would cause Google to breach it. That would be on the software user. If you use somewhere that to breach GDPR, the software provider is not liable for how the user uses it.

If you tell the software to do something that is a breach, or used it when you could reasonably be expected to know it would behave in such a way, then yes you are responsible.

If, for custom software/configuration, you specify software to do something automatically that is a breach, then yes also.

If the software does it without your instruction, especially if you explicitly opted out, that is in beach, then the service responsible for the software may be liable instead.

How enforceable this is, is a different discussion…

Re: Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

#126

Post by anigbrowl »

karanmg wrote: post #120
anigbrowl wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate you were downvoted. Perhaps it's because you're self-promoting, but you were up front about it and your pitch was relevant and focused on user needs.

Thank you. It is up to us to do something about making our software more privacy conscious. And management/leaders/founders have to put up the money to support it. This project is also an experiment to see if its possible to build a "successful" app without user behavior tracking, without endless AB testing.. and so far it seems totally possible.

I forgot to add that while I'm not an iPhone user (so can't test if it does this already) but if you can set it up to record phone calls it would be an absolute godsend for journalistic purposes.

Re: Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

#128

Post by fxtentacle »

I would love to recommend it already, but my self-built privacy oriented real-time transcription service isn't ready for release yet. You can join my email waiting list [1], though.

I tried to discover something that would stand the scrutiny of a German "Ausschreibung", which is a government call for bids. They require things to be GDPR-compliant by law, and they recently disqualified companies for using on-prem solutions by US Cloud providers with the argument that if it's a US company, the NSA can still force them to disclose GDPR-protected data. I reviewed all offerings I could find on the market. I couldn't find anything good, which is when I decided to build my own.

For what it's worth, I also published a paper on improving German ASR already [4].

In my opinion, the only 100% offline and, hence, 100% private solutions that are ready to use right now are VOSK and Coqui STT. But their recognition quality is atrocious. Like pre-2016 word-error-rate on LibriSpeech / CommonVoice. Then there's Scribosermo, which is converted NVIDIA models, so it comes with a lot of rules for how you're allowed to use it, and quality is still worse than all US clouds and it's quite slow, like 2s delay.

In addition to that, I could only find companies who more or less openly re-sell the cloud AI solutions from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Alibaba. But that won't fly for German government bids [2].

I believe your best option is to wait for me ;) to finish my local tool [1] which will have a WebRTC server so that you can just script it however you want :) And your second best option is probably to use HuggingFace Transformers with Facebook's pre-trained base models [3].

[1] https://madmimi.com/signups/f0da3b13840d40ce9e061cafea6280d5... [2] https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=VK_Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg... [3] https://huggingface.co/blog/fine-tune-wav2vec2-english [4] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/tevr-improving-speech-recog...

Re: Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

#129

Post by PeterisP »

nvr219 wrote: post #41
croes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't the need the permission of all participants to transcribe?

No you do not - at least not technically! I had to look into this at work. I looked at WebEx, Teams, and Zoom - all three let auto-transcribe just roll. I think on one of them it gives a quick popup saying it's transcribing but no consent required. Contrast with audio/video recording where Zoom lets you either consent or leave the meeting. I asked our legal counsel and they said it's kind of iffy whether live auto-tr…

The big difference here is that in such a scenario all of the participants explicitly use the Teams or Zoom and they're technically "getting notified about recording" in the terms and conditions of Teams or Zoom telling that Microsoft or Zoom is getting the recordings which they got when starting to use Teams or Zoom. However, in that bot scenario, none of the other participants are users of otter.ai, have no relationship with them and so can't grant any permissions.

Re: Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

#130

Post by pbreit »

bombcar wrote: post #23

The big names provide recording and transcription now - Zoom has it, Teams has it (Teams apparently does it realtime and live and it's not bad, great for the deaf!). I suppose those are part of paid plans, and they trigger the "your shit is being recorded, dude." warnings.

That's not the news. The news is that otter.ai did it automatically and even though the user had it disabled.
Post reply on HN