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AI Notetaker hell (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 months ago by RedWizard@hexbear.net to c/chat@hexbear.net

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Found out today that we've had a rash of rogue accounts trying to join confidential calls at work. Meetings about students' 504s happen over Google Meet, for example. The accounts are always named after the person in the call like "John's Notetaker" or what have you.

Apparently, it's some kind of extension people are using that transcribes meeting notes from the call. AKA it listens and likely records the call in real time to then transcribe the call into notes. Very dumb, and also, a huge privacy issue when we're talking about 504s. There isn't a way to stop it from what I can tell because the user joining the call has the extension, and the extension detects the meeting and attempts to join as well.

Very stupid, very annoying.

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[–] Doom4535@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't use Google Meet, but can you disable the dial-in option and make it only use PC client? It would at least break the automated dial in part if so (someone could technically still run a service that highjacks their computer audio, but that would be a lot more work).

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's an interesting thought. One of the things that people told us was that the members of the meeting asked if anyone knew what this "notetaker" was, and everyone would say "no". They have a name, but from what I'm hearing, no one shared a name with the notetaker. So it would be like having someone try to join named "Frank's Notetaker" and no one in the meeting was named Frank. They also noted it was persistent, it kept trying to join the meeting.

I don't know that a browser extension would be able to listen into the call. I can't be sure it could actually tap into the audio stream in that way and listen to it. I know I've had some extensions installed in the past that let me change the audio level of a given tab, but not sure if that means an extension could actually read the audio data.

So if that's true, if an extension cannot get a feed of audio from a source like a meeting, then it would need to use something like the phone in option to call into the meeting and get the audio that way.

[–] Doom4535@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 months ago

If it runs as an installed program on the host, it could hook up into the audio stream as an audio sink and listen to that; I'm not sure if it's possible for a browser extension to so that, there might be an audio equalizer that could be modified, but I was more thinking something like a true 'desktop' app or service