Quick heads up if you use an AI tool to record and transcribe your meetings.

This week, a security researcher found that tl;dv, a popular AI notetaker used with Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, had left a massive number of meeting recordings exposed. We're talking roughly 182,000 meetings across tens of thousands of users, all sitting there queryable by basically anyone with an account, not because of some sophisticated hack, but because of a missing permission setting that should have kept each company's data separate from everyone else's. The company reportedly knew about it for six months before it got fixed.

I want to be clear about what this is and isn't. This isn't a reason to swear off AI meeting tools entirely, and it isn't unique to this one company. It's a reminder that "AI notetaker" tools are handling something more sensitive than people tend to treat it as. Client conversations, internal strategy discussions, HR conversations, all of it gets recorded, transcribed, and stored somewhere, and that somewhere is only as secure as the company running it decided to make it.

What I'd actually check if you use one of these tools

Look at whether the tool lets you delete recordings after a set period, rather than storing everything indefinitely. The less sits around, the less there is to expose if something like this happens again.

Check what the tool's privacy policy actually says about data isolation between customers, not just "we take security seriously" language, but whether they specify tenant-level separation. Most people never read this, and most of the time it doesn't matter. This is a case where it would have.

Be more deliberate about what gets recorded in the first place. Not every meeting needs a transcript. The ones with sensitive client information or internal HR conversations are worth turning the recorder off for, regardless of how convenient the tool is.

This is also a good moment to mention, if you're using Fathom, which I recommended in a recent post, this specific incident wasn't about them. I'm not aware of a similar issue there. But the lesson applies across the board, not just to one company. Any tool sitting in your meetings has access to more than it might feel like day to day.

None of this means stop using AI notetakers. It means treat them like what they are, a tool with access to real, sensitive conversations, not just a convenience feature.