Call recordings, transcriptions, and summaries can be incredibly useful, and even critical, in many business contexts. However, it's crucial to ensure compliance with local laws and regulations. In the eyes of the law, individual users are always responsible for adhering to the law, even when they're using a software tool in service of the act of recording. This includes understanding and adhering to specific legal requirements in your region and those of other meeting participants. Proper notification and consent are essential to respect privacy and maintain trust among all parties involved.
In this article, we’ll provide tips on different ways to help you comply with consent and notification requirements, ensuring that your call recordings are both legal and respectful of everyone involved. We’ll cover how Fellow notifies meeting participants about the Note Taker recording the call, both prior to and during the meeting. Additionally, we’ll discuss what steps to take if a participant does not consent to being recorded, and share best practices to further safeguard your recording practices. These include implementing consent disclaimers and strategies for admitting the Note Taker once all attendees have joined. By following these guidelines, you can ensure a smoother and more compliant recording process.
Important note: if you are using botless recording it is up to you as the user to notify other participants that the call is being recorded.
Botless recording can be enabled or disabled by a workspace administrator at any time by visiting Workspace Settings > Note Taker & AI > Artificial Intelligence > Botless recording
How does Fellow notify meeting participants of the Note Taker recording the call?
Prior to the meeting
If the auto-record feature has been configured for this meeting, you'll see an indication within your Fellow calendar via the My Week page (A). Google Calendar users with the Fellow chrome extension will also be see the event description (B).
Note: if the Note Taker is manually invited to join this call, this will not appear.
A
B
During the meeting
You will be able to see that the Note Taker is about to join the meeting within your Fellow note:
The Fellow Note Taker will not record your call unless it is admitted entry by a participant or host. Once the Note Taker has been admitted, all present attendees will see 1) the Note Taker appear as a participant, and 2) a message explaining who invited the Note Taker to join and that the call is now being recorded.
For meeting participants who are in your Fellow workspace, you'll also see an indication within your Fellow note that the call is being recorded:
Zoom Native Capture
When using Zoom Native Capture (also known as Real-Time Media Streaming or RTMS), Fellow records your Zoom meetings directly through Zoom's native recording API rather than having a bot participant join the call.
This means that unlike bot-based recordings, participants won't see the Fellow Note Taker appear in the participant list or receive a chat message notifying them that Fellow is recording. However, it's important to note that Zoom's own native recording indicators will still appear to participants if your Zoom account has recording notifications enabled.
Because participants won't see Fellow's explicit notification, it's especially important to follow the best practices outlined in this article - including adding consent disclaimers to your calendar event descriptions and sending pre-meeting notifications - to ensure all participants are aware that the meeting is being recorded and have the opportunity to consent or object before the recording begins.
If a meeting participant does not consent to being recorded, how can the Note Taker be removed?
If you'd like to remove the Note Taker from your call, you can either remove the Note Taker as a participant or stop the recording from within your Fellow note.
Redaction
Enterprise Plan users can redact portions of the video and transcript permanently so they can no longer be viewed:
Check out this article for a step-by-step walkthrough!
Other best practices
If you're looking to add additional precautions, here are a few extra tips to try:
Consent disclaimers
There are a few ways that you can implement consent disclaimers.
Pre-meeting disclosures: enable this automation on a per series basis to send an email 1 hour prior to the meeting. These can be configured on a per meeting series basis or an Administrator on the Enterprise plan can configure this for you entire workspace.
Pre-meeting reminder through Fellow's automations to automatically notifying attendees on a per note series basis:
Calendar event descriptions: Add a note to your calendar description prior to a meeting notifying them that the call will be recorded
Admitting the Note Taker once all attendees have joined
Another great best practice adopted by teams using call recorders has been to wait until all attendees who will be joining the call have been admitted. This ensures that all attendees see the Note Taker join and can object if they do not consent to being recorded.
More Information
For more information on our security and privacy, check out our Trust Centre.