Incident 1650: Otter.ai Notetaker Allegedly Recorded Meeting Conversations Without Participants' Informed Consent and Used Data for AI Training

Description: In February 2025, Otter.ai's Notetaker reportedly recorded and transcribed a Zoom conversation involving Justin Brewer, a San Jacinto, California resident who was not an Otter account holder, without his informed consent. Brewer later alleged that Otter obtained and retained his meeting communications and used captured data to train its speech-recognition and machine-learning systems.

Editor Notes: 02/24/2025 is the incident ID date; the incident ID itself was created 08/20/2026. See a copy of the complaint here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26052769-otter-complaint/.

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Entities

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Alleged: Otter.ai and AI transcription technology developers developed an AI system deployed by Otter.ai users , Otter.ai and AI transcription tool users, which harmed Otter.ai users , Privacy , People recorded without consent , Justin Brewer and Employees.

Alleged implicated AI systems: Otter Notetaker , AI transcription tools and Enterprise AI systems

Incident Stats

Incident ID

1650

Report Count

Incident Date

2025-02-24

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Class-action suit claims Otter AI secretly records private work conversations

vpm.org

Enterprise note-taking apps face legal scrutiny as Otter hit with privacy suit

computerworld.com

Otter.ai faces class action lawsuit for unauthorized meeting recording

ppc.land

AI Note-Taking Tools, Silent Recording, and the Consent Problem: What the Granola Class Action Means for Companies Building and Deploying Conversation Capture Tools

natlawreview.com

When AI Takes Notes: Court Allows Privacy Claims Against Otter.ai to Proceed

sheppard.com

vpm.org · 2025

Otter.ai is a Mountain View, Calif.-based tech company that uses artificial intelligence to generate speech-to-text transcriptions. It has become a popular tool for transcribing virtual office meetings.

A federal lawsuit seeking class-actio…

computerworld.com · 2025

The complaint filed in California district court says the popular transcription service records users and uses their voices and data to train its models without consent.

Otter.ai and other call recording, note-taking apps like Read.ai and e…

ppc.land · 2025

Justin Brewer filed a class action lawsuit against Otter.ai, Inc. on August 15, 2025, alleging the company violated federal and California privacy laws through its AI-powered meeting assistant. According to court documents filed in the Nort…

natlawreview.com · 2026

Highlights

Chamberlain v. Granola, Inc., No. 3:26-cv-07926 (N.D. Cal. July 30, 2026) joins a line of cases that includes class actions against Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai, other AI note-taking providers. Together, this line of cases highligh…

sheppard.com · 2026

Otter.ai's AI notetaker tool has been accused of violating Illinois's biometric privacy law, and the California court hearing the case recently let the proceedings move forward. As we have previously written in our sister blog, AI notetaker…

Variants

A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.

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