Are AI meeting notetakers private?
Mostly, no — not in the sense people assume. Cloud notetakers (Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv) upload, process, and store your meetings on their servers under their retention and security policies. A notetaker is only truly private when recording, transcription, and storage happen on infrastructure you control — which is what self-hosted tools like Donna do.
What happens to my meeting data on a cloud notetaker?
Your audio (often video) is uploaded to the vendor, transcribed on their compute, summarized by their AI stack — frequently involving further third-party AI providers — and stored under their retention policy. You hold an account; they hold the data. Vendors publish compliance pages (SOC 2, GDPR) that attest to how they protect that copy, but the copy exists, and it is subject to their breach surface, their subpoenas, and their policy changes.
How does self-hosting change the privacy answer?
It removes the vendor copy entirely. With Donna, recording happens on your VPS, files stay on your disk, the transcript and report live in your PostgreSQL database, and the dashboard sits behind authentication you configure. The only external calls are the ones you make with your own API keys — audio to Whisper large-v3 for transcription, text to DeepSeek for analysis — under agreements you hold directly. There is no notetaker vendor in your data path at all.
What should I check before trusting any notetaker?
Ask four questions. Where is the recording stored, and can I point to the machine? Who holds the AI provider relationships — me or a middleman? What is the retention policy, and who enforces it? And can a third party change these answers without my consent? A cloud notetaker answers all four with “the vendor.” A self-hosted one answers all four with “you.”
Related questions
Are meeting recordings used to train AI models?
Policies vary by vendor and plan tier, and they change — that is precisely the problem with holding your meetings in someone else’s cloud. With a self-hosted pipeline, no vendor holds a corpus of your meetings to make training decisions about.
Is a SOC 2 badge enough to call a notetaker private?
SOC 2 attests that the vendor protects the copy of your data it keeps. It does not remove the copy. Whether that is “private enough” depends on what is being discussed in your meetings — for boards, HR, negotiations, and client work, many teams conclude it is not.
Does self-hosted mean fully offline?
Not in Donna’s case: transcription and analysis are API calls made with your own keys. Fully offline pipelines exist (local Whisper models), trading convenience and quality for airgap. The decisive privacy step is removing the vendor’s stored copy — self-hosting does that.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Donna deploys onto your own VPS in an afternoon: nginx, pm2, PostgreSQL, your API keys. Early access is open — tell us about your team and we’ll get her a seat at your table.
Request early access