First, the app may retain recordings and transcripts of your meetings indefinitely once used. They can also reuse them for any number of internal purposes, including model training and marketing campaigns. Second, state laws often require all parties to consent before a conversation is recorded. AI note-takers argue that the onus of obtaining consent falls on the person using the recording app, aka you. So if you recorded a meeting but didn’t disclose it to the other party, they could actually sue you for violating their data protection rights.
That’s why multiple AI note-taking platforms are now facing class-action lawsuits from users who accuse them of mishandling their data and passing the baton of consent down to customers without informing them about this properly. I'll walk through the current legal situation, as well as what steps you can take to protect your data going forward.
What the Granola lawsuit is all about
California plaintiffs have filed a class action suit against Granola for multiple CIPA violations Credit: LifehackerMoreover, by design, no one in the meeting can turn Granola off, except for the user who has the app installed on their device. Users are also opted into model training by default, so they must manually opt out if they don’t want the company to retain the conversation records. Even if a user does opt out of model training, this setting does not apply backwards, and prior conversation records are still retained for training purposes.
In their formal complaint, the plaintiffs’ lawyers cite multiple federal and state law violations, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California's Invasion of Privacy Act. Granola denies these accusations by saying that it anonymizes all training data before use and that no conversation data is sent to third parties, but the plaintiffs reject this framing.
Granola isn’t the only one with the problem
Several educational institutions have banned Read AI use because of risks to organization data security Credit: University of Washington Information Technology (UWIT)Fireflies.ai is also facing multiple class action lawsuits for violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by harvesting voiceprints from meeting participants using its speaker recognition technology without obtaining consent from those recorded. Read AI has not faced a lawsuit, but the app is banned from multiple public and private universities, including the University of Washington, Chapman University, Tufts University, and Mississippi State University. A notice on the University of Washington website reads, “Read AI can join, transcribe, and summarize their users’ online meetings even when the users are not in attendance,” adding that it poses significant “security and privacy risks to institutional data.”
Who is responsible for obtaining consent with AI note-taking apps?
AI note takers are using written contracts to shift the onus of consent downstream Credit: GranolaOf course, all of this is based on a clause in the user agreement you sign when creating a new account with the note-taking app, which is no doubt buried under heaps of other text that no one bothers to read. Historically, courts don’t look favorably upon tech companies hiding behind terms of service agreements and passing accountability onto users. But that’s not granted and still subject to case-by-case determination by the presiding judge.
How to protect your individual rights with AI note-taking apps
There’s no denying the convenience of AI transcriptions, plus you can’t really control what software other people in a meeting choose to run in secret. But there are some things you can do to protect yourself from privacy violations and compliance issues, both as a user and another meeting participant.
To that point, if anyone in the meeting is a resident of California, Illinois, or another all-party consent state, assume that you must verbally inform and ask permission before you begin recording.
Before you give an AI app access to your meetings, make sure that you’ve opted out of any model training or data sharing agreements in your app settings.
None of this can fully guarantee that you’ll never be subjected to privacy violations from an AI meeting bot, but being aware and conscious helps you stand a better chance of defending your rights. If a meeting requires disclosing sensitive information and you’re unsure if you’re being recorded by an AI app, it’s best to leave the meeting entirely and obtain written confirmation from the host before proceeding.
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