In Otter news, transcription app accused of illegally recording users’ voices Voice transcription service Otter.ai has found itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit that claims it trains its speech recognition tech without securing permission to do so. A complaint [PDF] filed last week on behalf of plaintiff Justin Brewer, points out that the company offers a service called the “Otter Notetaker” that …
Crossed my desk at the beginning of the year "unnamed AI providers in privacy policy - block".
I've since seen the same weasel terms [no pun intended] cropping up in similar policies - words to the effect that the publisher expects you the customer to gain permission from all participants, and it's your liability if you do not.
A user in my org signed up to Otter. They joined the company all-hands call. Everybody in the company subsequently received an invite to join Otter - crafted to look as if sent by that user. A few of those users then signed up, to then have the same cycle repeat.
Time taken from the initial user signing up to having customers calling to complain about our users spamming them with invites was under two hours.
Reputational damage control (client confidential data etc.) and blocking the bloody thing took days!
This is a propagation pattern that directly matches email-borne malware, and Otter should be treated every bit as ruthlessly as those criminals.
This should tell you everything you need to know about their business ethics, and whether you should ever touch them, or a call with their bot listening.
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