People are transcribing your conversations without asking. That puts you at risk.

Sign in<br>Subscribe

Link: This Conversation Is Being Recorded. They All Are., by Katherine Bindley at the Wall Street Journal<br>I’ve been thinking about this story for days.<br>“A Zoom call isn’t complete without an artificial-intelligence note taker. Phones are out at meetings, capturing every word. During impromptu conversations with co-workers, someone might turn on the Granola transcription app, which can turn the interactions into one-page summaries or a list of action items. Even at bars and on dates, people are using AI-infused listening apps to analyze conversations later on.”<br>The story goes on to talk to a woman who uses Granola to record her dates, then pours the transcripts into Claude to give her feedback about how she could have done better. And there’s account after account of people using it in meetings without asking for consent or revealing that they’re recording.<br>Certainly in Silicon Valley, a societal shift seems to be underway. It’s likely much more widespread than that. I’ve been present in meetings outside the tech industry where Granola’s watermarking was visible but I wasn’t asked to consent. The watermarking is optional; I have to assume I’ve been in meetings where I’ve been recorded without my knowledge.<br>Pair this trend with the story that the Trump Administration actively sought the phone records of journalists — and their families — who reported on the new Qatari-gifted Air Force One. Subpoenas were issued to the phone carriers, and the Department of Justice notified the newsroom a week later. In some cases, subpoenas can be issued to carriers and service providers privately, allowing the data to be retrieved without the newsroom’s knowledge; in this case, the DoJ did try to gag the phone company from alerting the newsroom.<br>A world in which every conversation is recorded and transcribed is one where every conversation can be subpoenaed or surveilled. Here, the surveillance is decentralized through people who actively want to conduct it for their own benefit, but the data is still stored centrally and available for authorities to subpoena or someone else to mine. Granola’s security page makes clear that the data is accessible to them — and therefore to a third party that compels them to hand it over — and notes that:<br>“Granola trains on your anonymized data so we can keep making Granola better. You can opt out of this in your Settings.”<br>Granola makes a point of saying that audio is not stored, but given that transcriptions are, this seems moot: the words in a conversation carry its meaning. Subpoenas for your conversations go to it, not to you, and you may never know they were served. If you record someone’s conversation without letting them know, you’re putting them at risk.<br>Don’t get me wrong: I would love to have an automatic summary of meetings I’ve taken part in. I have also run meetings on non-sensitive topics where I’ve asked for consent before starting transcription. It’s the ubiquity and covert nature of the transcription that bothers me, paired with its central storage in what amounts to a honeypot for subpoenas and hackers.<br>Recording a conversation with someone without their consent is illegal in many states and countries, so this behavior may be forced to change. California is one of them, and Granola appears to be thriving there, so there is a world where the law changes to meet the new ubiquitous surveillance norm. Until the dust settles one way or the other, anyone who wants to talk about a sensitive topic, particularly in Silicon Valley, will need to be more wary than usual.

Read more

American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing.

China's open-weights AI strategy is winning: its companies are taking the lead. America's closed-first, locked-down strategy is doomed to failure - and it could take the US economy down with it.

Notable links: July 17, 2026

At a time when journalism is increasingly under attack, we need PIT Crews for news.

To innovate, news needs allies

"Allies, archives and infrastructure in the AI age" - a list of people with the potential to push news forward.

The SFPD leaked its drone footage. It shouldn't be surveilling to begin with.

Surveillance doesn't improve crime or make anyone safer. It wastes civic dollars and creates new risks for vulnerable communities. The SFPD's leak demonstrates one reason why.

Mastodon

Bluesky

Threads

Subscribe to new posts

Ben Werdmuller explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. Always independently published, reader-supported, and free to read.

Subscribe