When Is Enough A Law Obeyed?

Somebody’s Taking Notes

There used to be a simple rule in any room where people talked. You looked around and you knew who was listening. If someone had a notepad, you saw it. If someone had a recorder, it sat on the table where everyone could see it.

That rule is fading. The listening has moved off the table and onto people. It’s in a watch on a wrist, a pendant on a shirt, a pair of glasses that look like any other glasses. A machine can be in the room taking notes, and nobody but the wearer knows it’s there.

These are called AI notetakers. They started out inside video calls. You’d join a meeting online and a little helper would join with you. It wrote down what was said and handed you a summary at the end. Handy. Most folks liked it.

Now those helpers have legs. They walk into kitchens and offices and doctors’ waiting rooms. They sit in on the talk at the coffee shop. The person wearing one may mean no harm at all. But the people around them never got a vote.

That vote matters. In a number of states, the law says everyone in a conversation has to agree before it gets recorded. Not just the person pressing the button. Everyone. A machine hanging from someone’s neck makes that agreement very hard to get and very hard to prove.

The courts are starting to hear about it. In August of 2025, a man named Brewer filed suit against Otter.ai, one of the best-known notetaking companies. He claims the tool recorded people in meetings without all of them agreeing. He also claims the company used those recordings to teach its own machines. Those are claims, not findings. No judge has ruled. But the question is now on the table in a federal court.

Overseas, Norway’s government has gone a step further. This month it proposed a temporary ban on AI glasses in certain places. Those places include schools, playgrounds, clinics and changing rooms, where people have every reason to expect they aren’t being watched. That proposal still has to pass their parliament. But a whole country is saying out loud that some rooms should stay unrecorded.

So far this is about who’s listening. There’s a second problem, and it’s quieter. It’s about what the machine hears and what it does with it.

These notetakers don’t just record. They read, too. When someone shares a document in a meeting, the machine reads it along with everybody else. Here’s the trouble: a document can carry words that aren’t meant for people. They can be written in white letters on a white page, or tucked in so small nobody would notice. They’re aimed at the machine.

Those hidden words can tell the machine what to do. Leave out this part. Make that person sound bad. Say the meeting agreed when it didn’t. The people in the room never see those orders. They only see the summary, and the summary looks clean.

This isn’t a made-up worry. People have already been caught hiding instructions for machines inside papers filed in court. The trick is out there. Any place a machine reads, somebody can try to whisper to it.

Think about what that means. A summary of a meeting can become the official record of that meeting. It goes in a file and gets passed around. Months later it may get pulled into a dispute. If the summary was bent, the record is bent, and the people who were there may never know.

So where does that leave you and me? It leaves us with work to do, and none of it requires a law degree.

First, if you wear one of these things, say so. Say it at the start, out loud, before anybody talks. It costs you one sentence. It gives everyone else back the vote they’re owed. That’s simple decency, and in some places it’s the law.

Second, if you use the summaries, read them against what you remember. Don’t take the machine’s word as the final word. You were in the room. Your memory counts as evidence too. If the summary doesn’t match what happened, trust yourself enough to say so.

Third, ask how long the notes are kept. Every company that runs one of these tools is holding somebody’s words somewhere. Ask where. Ask how long. Ask who can read them. If the answer is fuzzy, that tells you something.

Fourth, and this is the one I care about most, expect the machine to tell you when something is trying to steer it. A well-built system should treat instructions hidden inside a document as information, not orders. It should say, “I found this text aimed at me, and I didn’t follow it.” That isn’t too much to ask. It’s the least we should ask.

That idea sits at the heart of the Baseline. A machine should treat what it reads as information, not as orders. The words in a document are something to report, not something to obey. Only the person running the session gives direction. The machine doesn’t take orders from the paper it was handed.

None of this works on its own, though. A rule like that only helps when someone holds the machine to it. That someone is us, the folks using these tools every day. We’re the watchdogs whether we signed up for it or not.

The old rule about rooms still stands. You ought to know who’s listening. What’s changed is that you can’t always see them anymore. So you have to ask. And when you’re the one doing the listening, you have to tell.

Somebody’s taking notes. Make sure everybody knows it, and make sure the notes tell the truth.

The Time Has Come

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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