Comment by wustep
5 days ago
Hey!
1. Notion records audio only during your use of the Meeting Notes feature. Here are the docs: https://www.notion.com/help/ai-meeting-notes
2. Notion desktop app has notifications about meetings that ask you if you want to use Meeting Notes, it recognizes this by detecting that your microphone is on (i.e. it does not listen to audio coming from your microphone). This feature is a setting in preferences btw, under Notifications > Desktop meeting detection notification.
source: I work for Notion
To elaborate:
The Notion desktop app will observe if there is a process running on your computer that is actively using your microphone, such as Zoom.
Notion does not and cannot listen to the audio coming from your microphone ambiently or snoop on the signal received by another application. This detection is done purely based on the existing of a process using your microphone, not on the audio coming from the microphone. Users can verify this because the OS-level microphone indicator will show that Notion is not listening to their microphone.
If one is detected, Notion will notify the user and try to associate it with a calendar event if you have connected your calendar. Connecting your calendar is not a requirement to receive this notification.
Users can disable this behavior via their account settings in Settings > Notifications > Desktop meeting detection notifications.
Only when the user has started a meeting note and clicked record, will Notion activate the user's microphone. We cannot do this without operating system mediated consent dialog, which is the way it should be! At this point Notion will show up as using the microphone in the OS indicators.
(I work at Notion)
It is not genuine to say that Notion cannot listen in. Notion can listen in. Anytime it wants. Yes on Macs an indicator will be displayed - but not always prominently depending on what other apps/devices are being used (for example using continuity camera)
Source: I built the same listening infrastructure into other meeting note taking apps. Our team spoke at length about this security issue with Apple.
I work at Notion. We don't ship code that would let us listen in until users explicitly click start recording. We don't want to, we aren't in the business of selling data and this would be incredibly expensive - and destroy trust. We are cash flow positive so we can sustain our values for the long term. We build useful software and get paid by our users for it. It's pretty simple. Agree that operating systems should display prominent indicators when the microphone is in use.
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Please tell me which meeting note apps use underhanded methods to secretly record my conversations, just so that I can blacklist them company wide.
Make it opt-in and this would be not an issue.
Notion doesn't like making things opt-in.
A feature that's opt-in will get like 1% of the use of a feature that's opt-out. A happier middle ground would be to enable by default and show a "I don't like this, pls turn it off" button the first few times.
EDIT: shouldn't single out any specific role here. We think opt-out, enable-by-default makes a feature have far greater total utility. But we could do more to provide user agency for these features in-line during first use or find a different balance point.
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If they made borderline "features" like this opt-in, no one would and then the people driving this won't get the career prospect boost of shipping a new feature.
To be clear: recording is opt-in. We also remind users to ask for two-party consent. (obligatory "i work at notion")
Thanks for the explanation. I was about to install Notion Desktop today. I Won’t install it.
Why? I don't understand the objection to this. If the app was sending off any data to Notion without consent, that would obviously be a privacy issue, but why is it a problem for a desktop app to simply check if your mic is being used and offer to record?
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Yeah, no. You don't get to monitor my anything in order to provide features. I was never a user of notion and I definitely won't be. It is just an oversight of the OS that your process is allowed to see the list of other processes.
I do not want to be spied on and have 0 trust for any company wishing to do any kind of monitoring of my usage in order to provide or advertise "features" to me.
While you're here - can you tell your PM's that your auto update on windows is annoying. Every time I start the app there's a prompt asking me to either "Install and Relaunch" or "Remind me later" (which seems to just hassle me again on next app start). The worst part is the pop-up doesn't show until 5-10 seconds after I start the app. So I'll start the app, start clicking around and then I'm interrupted by this pop-up. This seems to happen every day because you push a lot of updates.
I'd prefer an option to silently grab non-security/non-fix updates once every [Day, Week, Month] in the background, and install automatically on next app start up. Urgent updates can happen immediately. The default should be every week as every update is around 85mb. You could go a step further and have an option to only download over WiFi.
As for the mic "issue", I'm not sure what everyone's on about. Acting like it's the first app on Windows to monitor what the system is doing to provide a feature.
From 1)
> If you do not want the AI Meeting Notes feature available to your users, administrators may opt-out their workspace at any time via the toggle available in their console.
Here's your problem: Make this opt-in.
AI features + user opt-in are mutually exclusive at this point.
Why didn't Notion ask for my affirmative consent before monitoring my network traffic?
Are there other cases where Notion is monitoring my network traffic? If so, what are they?
There's no network traffic monitoring, not sure what the support agent is talking about -- I think they misunderstood something.
See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/1i4ypl8/comment/m8o... for info about the "local network access" permission
So just to confirm, you are saying that "network port analysis" is NOT used to determine if someone has entered a zoom meeting?
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FWIW, you can verify when any apps are recording microphone input by the OS's microphone indicator. I think Windows, Mac, and Linux all have one.
(edit: see what @jitl said)
Does any of that microphone detection stuff send anything over the network to Notion to indicate that the check was done, plus the check's results?
let me look
EDIT: no, there's no transmission of logs or analytics events besides a check to see if the feature is enabled. We only transmit some data if you ask Notion to record.
Thanks for the answer.
Just want to clarify for pedantic reasons - is there transmission regardless of whether it's enabled or disabled? And does that happen only if someone asks Notion to record?
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How does it work in two-party consent states?
Like, I can give my consent, but the meeting attendees can't, right?
Does Notion just listen to me, not my attendees?
I only ask because we got an email about recording meetings from HR/Legal a couple weeks ago and I never considered it before
i assume it's the user's responsibility to use software legally
I think you're probably right
I believe it's Notion, not me, who is doing the recording. And Notion doesn't require everyone's consent, just mine.
So if I am to take your meaning, it'd be up to me to disable the meeting notes if any other attendee is in a 2 party consent state (assuming everyone is in the US, IDK how other countries handle that)
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If it helps, this has been one of the most infuriating things for me in recent memory. I don't understand why this wasn't opt-in.
thanks, will fwd to team
you're talking about the desktop notification in particular, right?
Yeah. I mean, the rest is concerning. But one day it just started popping up every time I went into a meeting. Which, of course, was exactly the time that I was busy in a meeting, and didn't have time to dig through settings to figure out how to turn it off.
* team receives feedback
"Bin it, no one will turn it on, make them turn it off if they don't want it"
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Can you give me a source beyond "just trust me, bro"?
your OS shows a microphone icon when apps are recording audio — when you use the app, you should see that when recording is on during the meeting transcription and off otherwise
our app is electron and you can open the chromium dev tools via the help menu. if you want to verify yourself.