> Last year, an AI researcher and engineer said Otter had recorded a Zoom meeting with investors, then shared with him a transcription of the chat including "intimate, confidential details" about a business discussed after he had left the meeting. Those portions of the conversation ended up killing a deal,

I'm sorry but this is another example of not checking AI's work. Whatever about the excessive recording, that's one thing, but blindly trusting the AI's output and then using it blindly as a company document for a client is on you.

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kg 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I checked the original tweet to try and understand this better and what appears to have happened is that Otter kept recording after he left and the VCs stayed on the call chatting (for hours, according to the tweet). This violates the assumption baked into the recording agent (all participants of the call have a right to a transcript of the whole call) by repurposing a scheduled meeting into a party line/just chatting sort of situation.

You could fix this by training people not to use booked meetings this way but I'm not sure how realistic that is to do. I think it might be that services like Otter need to be adjusted to take into account that not every part of a meeting is of equal sensitivity.

i.e. my HOA's monthly meetings have a private period for the board only and a public period for all residents. If Otter were used in this configuration, it would broadcast the exact details of those private discussions to the whole building, which might include board members discussing details that shouldn't be shared with everyone.

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bilekas 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I think it might be that services like Otter need to be adjusted to take into account that not every part of a meeting is of equal sensitivity.

One would like to think that a company transcribing company meetings of varying degrees of sensitivity would have the feature you're describing built into it. If nothing else other than the auditing process that's usually involved for new software.

Maybe just those companies in a rush to adopt the latest AI tooling are not fully considering what they're doing.

	▲	brendang_sd 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That’s part of it too, the bigger issue is the knowledge and consent of other participants. I know someone who is involved in a lawsuit regarding a child, and one of the lawyers used this service to record and transcribe a very confidential meeting. Their first awareness of the illegal wiretapping by this company was when a summary email showed up at the end of the meeting. Needless to say, they weren’t happy, not just about the surreptitious recording, but also the discovery that the contents of that confidential coal will live forever in Otter’s training set. When the company was asked about this, they dismissed any kind of responsibility of their own, and noted it the responsibility of their subscribers to use the product appropriately.

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themanmaran 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This just seems like massive user error. The same thing could have happened in a low tech environment. And the notetaker just made it more obvious.

Ex: Hop on a conference call with a group of people, Person A "leaves early" but doesn't hang up the phone, then the remaining group talks about sensitive info they didn't want Person A to hear.

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bilekas 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Person A "leaves early" but doesn't hang up the phone, then the remaining group talks about sensitive info they didn't want Person A to hear.

I'm sorry but any conference software will make it extremely clear who is still on the call. Again I do put a lot of this scenario down to the User-fault. But the fact that this software is "always on" instead of "activated/deactivated" feels like incomplete software suite to me personally.

	▲	blitzar 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> who is still on the call On internet / app based systems yes ... but on legacy telephone systems you have to remember all 16 of the '<Person> is joining the call' and mentally check them off when you get the '<Person> is leaving the call' on the way out. Of course you have no idea who joined the meeting before you arrived. You didnt even have to make the mistake once to know not to keep talking on the call anyone can dial into after you think everyone left.