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THE "FRIENDLY" AI COMPANY CHINA IS LIKELY USING TO SPY ON ALL YOUR MEETINGS By Berit Anderson
FiRe is back! Register now for Future in Review, returning live at the beautiful Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, CA, November 6-9. Join old friends and new at this life-changing event. _____ Why Read: Strategic News Service recommends deleting Otter.ai from all devices, as we believe it may be being used as spyware by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and its data policy provides no security around sensitive user data.
Last Friday started out normal enough, with a meeting with a potential partner company, "Company A," for our conference, Future in Review. Evan Anderson and I signed on to the Teams call, which Company A had scheduled, and introduced ourselves to a new business contact. In the waiting-room queue, we were met with a sight I've grown pretty used to seeing: "[Pat's] Otter.ai." "Admit?" If you're not familiar with Otter.ai, it's an AI-driven transcription service that's widely used by businesses, educational institutions, and others to transcribe video and live audio. Its OtterPilot bot, once activated, joins every meeting you're invited to as a "participant," transcribes the meeting, captures screenshots of any slides shared, and provides all participants with a set of summarized notes at the end. It's a highly convenient feature for those who attend multiple daily meetings and struggle to stay on top of all their deliverables while remaining present and engaged in a conversation. It's also a great tool for journalists, who have traditionally been dogged with the task of creating detailed transcriptions of interviews - which can take hours and hours. In this case, though, something was off: the "Pat" in question is a member of our team, who had not been invited to (and therefore hadn't RSVP'd) to the meeting. I have many meetings every week that do not include Pat, and I have never seen Pat's OtterPilot show up in any one of them. And the company we were talking with is a major multinational corporation with insight into the inner operations of a large number of Western companies. Dear Reader, we declined the Otter. |
