What actually leaves in one meeting.
One ordinary 30-minute sales call, read out loud. This is what a free or cheap cloud AI notetaker receives, how long it keeps it, what it may do with it, and what you get in return.
The meeting, as recorded
Read what is spoken out loud: names, a client, an account number, a colleague's health, a price floor, a legal exposure, a password. Every highlighted item is personal or confidential data, and all of it is in the recording.
Your meeting, as recorded
Where it goes, and how long it stays
A cloud notetaker uploads the whole recording to its own cloud, usually in the US. Encryption on the way protects it from the internet, not from the vendor: on arrival it is decrypted, stored, backed up and read. Retention is set by the vendor. Many keep recordings and transcripts as long as their terms allow, long after the meeting, the deal, or the employee are gone. Markus Ebert's surgery is still in there next year.
Vendor cloud, US
Terms differ between providers and change over time. Read the ones you accepted.
The real price: what you get, and what you pay with
Free, or a few euros a month, buys a transcript and a summary. On the other side is everything the recording contained, kept for years, possibly trained into a model, never coming back. That is the trade you make when the notetaker is cheap.
What you get
- a transcripta text file
- a summaryeight lines
- an app, or a bot in the callthe bot is the extra guest
3 things, all replaceable.
What you pay with
- 2 voiceprintsbiometric data, GDPR Article 9biometriccannot be changed
- 4 names and a phone numberpeople who never agreedpersonalno consent asked
- Nordwerk GmbH and the IBANyour client relationshipclientin a third party's logs
- a colleague's medical leavespecial-category health datahealthno undo
- price floor 130, offer 138your negotiating positioncommercialreadable by their staff
- the Hamburg permit exposurelegal privilegelegalprivilege lost at upload
- the VPN passworda live credentialcredentialrotate it today
7 things, none reversible.
What meetrec does instead
Audio stays on your device or goes, encrypted, to our own servers in Nuremberg, Germany. It is deleted on a schedule you can see, never used for training, never sold. You pay with money and keep everything else.