Otter.ai Sued for Recording Meetings Without Participant Consent
Otter.ai faces a class-action lawsuit alleging that its Otter Notetaker application recorded and used conversations without consent from non-subscribers to train its AI models. The plaintiff claims this violated federal and California privacy laws, as meeting participants were unaware their conversations would be captured and used for machine learning purposes.
What happened
A class-action lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that Otter Notetaker, an AI transcription tool used to transcribe Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams meetings, recorded conversations of people who neither subscribed to Otter's services nor consented to being recorded.
The complaint states that Otter recorded, accessed, read, learned, and utilized the contents of conversations without consent to train its machine learning and automatic speech recognition technology. Plaintiff Justin Brewer participated in a Zoom meeting in February 2025 where Otter Notetaker was used but did not know he was being recorded or give his consent.
Reported impact
The lawsuit claims Otter's practices violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The suit states that Brewer "had his privacy severely invaded and been exposed to the risk and harmful conditions created by Otter's violations of federal and California law."
Index analysis
Otter's privacy policy states it trains its AI on "de-identified" audio recordings and claims to obtain explicit permission to access conversations for training. However, the suit alleges that Otter Notetaker only requests consent from the meeting host, not from other participants, and allows only the host to disable the recording.
The complaint cites research questioning the effectiveness of de-identification techniques. In 2024, the University of Massachusetts banned Otter.ai, stating it violated the state's all-party consent law.
Governance controls
The complaint notes that competitor Read.ai permits any meeting participant, including those who do not use Read.ai, to stop recording during a meeting.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.