Protecting Privacy & Professional Relationships When Using AI Meeting Recorders
Best practice for using automated AI recorders in online meetings:
Automated AI meeting recorders have become incredibly popular in recent years. Tools like Fireflies, Fathom, Fellow, Otter.ai, Zoom transcription, Teams recordings and countless browser extensions promise convenience: transcription, summaries, searchable notes and more.
But with this convenience comes important privacy and confidentiality risks, especially when the meeting involves sensitive financial, accounting, legal or strategic information.
At Aintree Group, we take your confidentiality extremely seriously. We always disable recordings and transcripts during sensitive discussions.
However, many clients are unaware that their own devices, apps, browser extensions or company-wide software may still automatically record and transcribe the meeting, even when we have turned everything off on our end.
Why you need to be cautious with AI recorders:
AI recording tools sometimes operate automatically, quietly, and in the background.
Depending on your settings, some tools:
- Auto-record every online meeting you join.
- Auto-transcribe all audio, even private conversations.
- Auto-upload transcripts to cloud accounts.
- Auto-share the full transcript with colleagues, teams, or administrators.
- Auto-email a copy to meeting participants.
- Store the information for machine-learning or product-improvement purposes.
This can expose highly confidential financial, commercial or personal information to people who were never intended to see it.
For example, discussions with your accountant, lawyer, bookkeeper or financial planner often involve information not suitable for company-wide visibility, and sometimes not even appropriate for anyone outside senior leadership.
‘Off the record’ means no recording anywhere:
If you want part of your meeting to be strictly off the record, remember that:
- Relying on your advisor to turn off their recording tools is not enough. E.g. even if Aintree Group disables recordings and transcriptions, your own software may still be capturing everything.
- Many apps default to ALWAYS recording. Some meeting-assistant tools start automatically unless you manually disable them before each meeting.
- Browser extensions may record without you realising. Chrome extensions like AI note-takers can run in the background independent of Zoom or Teams settings.
- Company-wide admin settings may override personal preferences. In some organisations, every transcript is automatically saved to a shared drive or visible to your IT administrator.
Best Practices For Protecting Confidential Information
Here are the steps we recommend to ensure your sensitive meetings remain confidential:
Identify all recording tools connected to your online meeting platforms.
Check if you use any of the following:
- Fireflies.
- Fathom.
- Otter.ai.
- Zoom Smart Summaries.
- Teams ‘Intelligent Recap’.
- Google Meet transcripts.
- Notion AI meeting notes.
- Browser plugins like Tactiq.
Disable auto-recording BEFORE joining a sensitive meeting.
Turn off:
- AI transcriptions.
- Video/audio recordings.
- Auto-join bots.
- Smart summary tools.
- Browser extension access.
Double-check your notification settings.
Ensure nothing is set to:
- Automatically email transcripts.
- Share meeting recordings internally.
- Sync transcripts to shared folders or CRMs.
For highly sensitive topics, announce that recording should be disabled.
This serves as a clear reminder to anyone present.
A simple ‘Before we begin, let’s make sure all recordings are turned off’ is perfectly appropriate.
Consider using a separate profile or browser for confidential meetings.
This avoids unwanted auto-recording from personal apps or plugins.
If in doubt, switch to a private phone call.
Phone calls avoid most automatic AI recording tools.
Aintree Group’s Commitment To Your Confidentiality
We understand the importance of discretion.
When we know we’ll be discussing taxes, business restructuring, legal matters, personal finances or other highly sensitive information:
- We disable all recordings and automated transcripts.
- We avoid using any AI tools that could store confidential data.
- We never share meeting content without your permission.
However, we can only control our side of the meeting.
To fully protect your information, we encourage you to ensure your own meeting tools are also disabled when the conversation needs to be private.
If you’re unsure, we’re happy to help!
If you’re not confident in turning these features off, or you’d like guidance on best practices for secure online communication, please reach out. Our team can help you:
- Identify recording tools you may not realise are running.
- Disable unnecessary or risky features.
- Set up a secure process for confidential meetings.
This is general advice only and has not been prepared with your situation and needs in mind. For individual and personalised advice, we highly recommend that you seek out proper professional advice from your adviser.
