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Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

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

#81

Post by bombcar »

smachiz wrote: post #67
nvr219 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Teams at least, it's called transcription, but really it's captioning. It's not recorded unless you also turn on recording.

Can you cut the text out of the caption window before leaving? The one I saw it was appearing in chat (I think?).

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

#83

Post by that_guy_iain »

noasaservice wrote: post #61
bogwog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Important thing here is, you're not a customer. That’s not the important thing at all. The important thing is the Otter.ai is violating the privacy of its users, potentially even breaking laws in some jurisdictions. If anything, it raises some more red flags that they’re ignoring consent for free users, since that could be interpreted as an attempt to monetize them by collecting data (again, without consent) If you…

Yeah, gotta "love" the 'we can break the law cause you didn't pay' HN philosophy. I would derive great enjoyment of them in court in a 2 party state telling a judge "well since they weren't really a customer....."

In a 2 party state the user would be the one breaking the law. They installed the software...

If you install recording software, you're liable for what it records. Bug or not bug, the liablity is yours. The only way you would get Otter.ai in a courtroom would be a civil case and then the not being a paying customer therefore no expectations of a warranty applies.

Seriously, this thread is "I installed recording software and it worked on things I didn't think it would. This company is terrible." while most of us work in tech and know that bugs exist and have generally written some bugs. Worse case, it's a bug. The solution is to stop using it and move on. Or pay for support and have them fix it.

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

#86

Post by password4321 »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #64
Bakary wrote: post #44

Is there such a thing as a simple audio transcribing system that can turn a recording into a text file? I have this problem where I sometimes forget a sentence someone JUST told me. And often my notes aren't sufficient compared to a verbatim recording because I'm liable to forget important contextual info very rapidly. But dealing with raw audio files is a PITA.

The VOSK library is good for transcription but there seems like a lack of good simple command line frontends for offline transcription of audio files. mp4grep works and I've been using it but it has some unnecessary features if this is all you want to do (it's mainly designed to cache the transcriptions and let you search them rather than just write them to a text file) and hopefully someone will make a simpler comma…

https://alphacephei.com/vosk/install#usage-examples demonstrates the bare-bones vosk-transcriber sample, and there's also https://www.assemblyai.com/blog/getting-started-with-espnet

I wasn't able to play with https://github.com/o-oconnell/mp4grep on ARM.

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

#87

Post by comboy »

Otter_ai wrote: post #85

[flagged]

Your reaction to the post tells me more about the company than the post itself.

And the sad reality is that while some users from this thread may never touch it, it's likely that nobody at the company will ever suffer any consequences, and the whole incident may be EV+ because more users join after hearing about it than leaving.

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

#88

Post by _zzaw »

This is egregious—and potentially illegal—enough that I suspect it's unintentional (bug, bad UX, misconfiguration, etc), but given how accustomed all of us are to the obnoxious, grubby tactics favored by tech companies, I'm not remotely surprised that the immediate assumption is that it was an intentional, malicious decision.

That's the problem with the selfish, user-hostile approach that a lot of businesses seem to think is acceptable. Short-term, maybe it works, but it breeds a deep cynicism and suspicion that no company should want in its customers. When things go wrong—and they will—you will not be given any benefit of the doubt, nor will you deserve it.

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

#89

Post by squeaky-clean »

jorams wrote: post #72

> The bot proceeded to join two confidential meetings on my behalf and record the whole thing, then email every member an absurd, inaccurate "outline" after. Can you explain how it was able to do this, apparently without people noticing? From what I understand it joins the meeting as a participant, which would be pretty obvious?

I'm curious about this too. Possibly some large internal meeting, like a company quarterly update on performance and plans going forward? If there's 200 attendees someone might not notice a random one. Though Google still requires approval whenever someone outside your domain joins a meeting, so I feel like that would get caught easily too.
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