If you have joined a video call recently, there is a good chance an AI notetaker joined too. These tools transcribe, summarize and pull out action items, and they have spread quickly through workplaces. They are also, in their own way, early Social AI: they have to work out who said what, who agreed and what was decided across a group of people.
The catch
A meeting has many participants, but usually only one of them installed the notetaker. The others may not have noticed it, understood it or agreed to it.
That gap has turned into legal risk. A federal class action filed in August 2025 accuses Otter.ai of violating wiretap laws by recording people who never signed up for the service. Suits are also pending against Fireflies.ai, Granola and Microsoft over Teams live transcription. In the Otter case, the court allowed wiretap and biometric claims to proceed to discovery. There has been no finding of liability, but the direction is clear: courts are taking the question of who consented seriously.
Why consent is a data question
For the companies building Social AI, this is not only a compliance issue. Meeting recordings are some of the richest examples of real group conversation that exist. But data collected without the agreement of everyone in it carries risk into every model trained on it. It can be challenged, withdrawn or restricted by future regulation.
Data collected with documented, all-party consent is the opposite. Its value holds up, and often grows, as rules tighten and unconsented alternatives disappear.
What good looks like
- Every participant agrees, not just the person who pressed record.
- Consent covers the specific use, including AI training if that is the plan.
- People can withdraw later, and their data is removed going forward.
- Buyers receive a record of who consented, when and to what.
Why it matters for Social AI
Social AI learns from what happens between people, which means every dataset involves several people's rights at once. The field will be built on recordings that everyone in them agreed to share.
Crosstalk is built around all-party consent: every voice in every session signs off, and every batch ships with a provenance manifest. See how consent works or read the paper.
Sources: BuildBetter on notetaker lawsuits, CSO Online.