Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network

430 points by HoyaSaxa 304 days ago | 171 comments

If you have the Notion Desktop App installed, you may have started to notice a "In a meeting? Start AI Meeting Notes" notification pop up exactly when you are joining a virtual meeting (e.g. joining a Google Meet on Firefox).

At first, I assumed it must have been using my Google Workspace account to snoop on my calendar. But then I started to notice it would notify exactly when I joined even if I was late and the meeting had previously started.

This was the response from Notion Support after they worked with the Notion Engineering team.

> Meeting Detection Architecture:

> - The system uses a sophisticated dual-detection approach: microphone monitoring combined with network port analysis

> - Detection is implemented separately for macOS and Windows at the native operating system level

I've uninstalled the Notion Desktop App...

wustep 304 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

jitl 304 days ago | |

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)

wferrell 304 days ago | | |

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.

chinathrow 304 days ago | | |

Make it opt-in and this would be not an issue.

dakiol 304 days ago | | |

Thanks for the explanation. I was about to install Notion Desktop today. I Won’t install it.

colechristensen 304 days ago | | |

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.

combyn8tor 304 days ago | | |

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.

chinathrow 304 days ago | |

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.

rchaud 304 days ago | | |

AI features + user opt-in are mutually exclusive at this point.

dml2135 304 days ago | |

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?

wustep 304 days ago | | |

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

wustep 304 days ago | |

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)

fusslo 304 days ago | |

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

93po 304 days ago | | |

i assume it's the user's responsibility to use software legally

chaps 304 days ago | |

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?

jitl 304 days ago | | |

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.

CubsFan1060 304 days ago | |

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.

wustep 304 days ago | | |

thanks, will fwd to team

you're talking about the desktop notification in particular, right?

DrillShopper 304 days ago | |

Can you give me a source beyond "just trust me, bro"?

wustep 304 days ago | | |

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

benaubin 303 days ago | | |

our app is electron and you can open the chromium dev tools via the help menu. if you want to verify yourself.

_kush 304 days ago |

They only check if your mic is on, not what you're saying (they can't hear you unless you've granted mic permission). They also look at your network traffic to see if audio is being sent (otherwise you can get a lot of false positives). Using mic + network data is a common way to spot meetings -- my app LookAway[0] does something similar to pause reminders during calls.

[0]: https://lookaway.app

AlexandrB 304 days ago | |

I thought you had to give explicit permission for an app to monitor network traffic in macOS? I'm assuming your app asks for this, but it sounds like Notion does not if the GP was surprised by the monitoring.

tbeseda 304 days ago | | |

My Notion install (macOS) asked to discover devices on my network. I'm assuming this permission is related to "monitoring network traffic".

_kush 304 days ago | | |

You don't need to give any explicit permissions for the snapshot of current sockets.

untech 304 days ago |

I’ve come to hate Notion with passion because of its abysmal performance, but I still pay for it for my small business. My non-technical employees use it as a database for clients, tasks, payments etc. I tried to research replacements several times, and still haven’t found anything good. Sometimes I wonder if I should build my own.

Pi9h 304 days ago |

If anyone is looking for an alternative to Notion without the bloat, I’m building https://docmost.com.

It has a nice UI, real-time collaboration, diagrams support and more.

You can self-host it too.

xelia 304 days ago | |

I self host docmost and love it, thank you for making it!

Will you consider making it publishable as a wiki? The current share feature is close but forces me to share a specific URL and live-edit public pages.

Pi9h 304 days ago | | |

The next sharing goal would be to make it possible to share an entire "Space", but not the "Workspace" itself.

Would that fit the ideas you have in mind?

oehpr 304 days ago | |

I've been looking for a tool like this that can publish. I was thinking of some way to create a help doc system for end users, but interleaved with technical information and discussion for devs. IE to make the help documentation a single source of truth for application behaviour.

All this needs to work is the ability to mark blocks of the document as "public" so only that gets published properly. Any possibility of doing this currently or interest in supporting in the future?

barbazoo 304 days ago | |

I love so much how nice this looks. But I wish this was Obsidian or rather, a standalone app. I don't want a web app for notes. Notes are all files. Different use case I know but I wish so much Obsidian looked and felt more like your app/Notion.

barbazoo 304 days ago | | |

Looking more into this, 4o actually produced a list of plugins that add functionality to do some of the things Notion excels at so that tells me that there probably is a way to get datatables etc.

savolai 304 days ago | |

I’m wondering if integrating this with nocodb mentioned above would work, as i also use databases in documents.

Pi9h 304 days ago | | |

You could use the Iframe embed feature to embed your NocoDB databases.

moomoo11 304 days ago | |

Very cool.

I wish tools like this could be embeddable. For example, being able to add it into existing apps.

toddmorey 304 days ago |

I have a funny story: I went to go to a notion doc and just intuitively pressed command-O in the app to open the notion doc I wanted. Of course that command doesn’t open notion docs—what that does is turn on audio transcription.

So two hours later, I realize I’ve transcribed at the bottom of our team overview page what read like the diary of a madman from fragments of conversation I was having with my wife and dog. I am glad I caught it and deleted it.

TYPE_FASTER 304 days ago | |

Did it transcribe the dog? How long until we get a LLM that can translate dog barks...

callalex 304 days ago | | |

People are doing some interesting work in an attempt to categorize whale and dolphin communication https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/

FredPret 304 days ago | | |

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFarSide/comments/1d041lu/hey_hey...

sevenseacat 304 days ago | |

That's not funny, that's horrifying.

pat64 304 days ago |

As someone who has built an app that detects calls and meetings, this isn’t as nefarious as you’re making it out to be.

You can detect patterns of hardware use that suggest you’re in a meeting without actually eavesdropping on an actual audio stream of any kind.

Basically is some app using the mic hardware for something?? Likely a meeting so.

shreddit 304 days ago | |

It’s not necessarily about what they doing, more like how they do things. They could at least tell me about it, like: Hey, we check whether you joined a meeting to provide you with our note taking assistant. Are you okay with that?

Don’t assume consent.

rob74 304 days ago |

Well, to give them the benefit of doubt, this monitoring could be done in a (more or less) privacy sensitive way, e.g. by analyzing the frequency spectrum of the audio input without actually recording or transmitting it, or as others have suggested, maybe they're just checking if the microphone is in use. And for the network they're apparently only monitoring the ports, not the actual data. But still, it sounds like a feature for which they should provide an option to turn it off - or, even better, make it opt-in.

like_any_other 304 days ago |

While both have privacy implications, I'd rather we distinguish 'monitoring' that exfiltrates your data to their servers, and offline-only 'monitoring', used only for legitimate, benign purposes of the program itself.

e9a8a0b3aded 304 days ago |

Are you saying that Notion desktop has access to microphone audio or it is only able to determine if the microphone is in use?

The former is actually concerning to me. I can't imagine caring if it only knows my microphone is in use.

_kush 304 days ago | |

It's the latter. An app can't access the audio without explicit microphone monitoring permissions.

jherdman 304 days ago |

If you go to "Settings > Notifications > Desktop meeting detections notifications" you can turn this feature off. I haven't verified if the mic and traffic sniffing is correspondingly turned off though.

sevenseacat 304 days ago | |

I don't have this setting on Mac.

nihalbaig 304 days ago |

that's really corcerning for user privacy!!

rubyn00bie 304 days ago |

This is insane. The amount of absolutely sensitive audio they could be grabbing is unbelievable. And port analysis? Why anyone would think this sort of intrusion is acceptable is boggling my mind. It’s a writing app for god sakes. I hope the backlash from this is both severe and swift.

chinathrow 304 days ago |

This is unethical and creepy behavior - Notion team reading this: How exactly did you come up with this?

pull_my_finger 303 days ago |

Is "network port analysis" the same thing Facebook was recently getting (justified) heat for? Basically snooping local ports to see what apps are running?

nashashmi 304 days ago |

What is notion?

I have been pulling my hair trying to learn these new no code db tools. And I think I have come to a simple explainer.

It is a list of documents built with (something called) block-editors. Each document can be given properties. The properties get listed into columns. The columns are fields. The documents are rows. And that makes a database table.

In reverse, it is a database table of records. One record can be can be configured with various fields, plus a document "canvas" made by a block-editor.

The block editors can import and display views (aka queries) of database tables. And that is what makes it a full circle spaghetti. A document (listed in a database) can display a database table.

pseudocomposer 304 days ago |

macOS will always show the user yellow/green notifications in the menu bar when apps access the microphone/camera, as far as I understand.

I keep Notion Desktop open pretty much all the time on my work laptop, and have not seen these.

I’m happy to be wrong (well, in this case, I’d be upset at a big privacy violation)… but it seems pretty unlikely the audio monitoring is happening on macOS.

chinathrow 304 days ago |

361 points within 5 hours, 112 comments but off the frontpage. Why @dang?

Torwald 304 days ago |

Thank you for telling HN, much appreciated! I am concerned re privacy, so, thanks again.

There is a rule in journalism to not burn one's sources, did you violate that rule in the OP? (I don't know, I am not a journalist.)

We could invite Notion management to comment on this thread.

ipsum2 304 days ago | |

He's not a journalist, why would he need to follow the rules of journalism?

Torwald 303 days ago | | |

He doesn't need to in a strict sense, but these rules represent best practices and emerged for good reasons.

whalesalad 304 days ago |

This is an unintended benefit of being on a Linux workstation - the only client available is the browser.

JoshTriplett 304 days ago | |

This kind of thing is one of many reasons I refuse to install Zoom/Discord/etc apps. Stay in your sandboxed browser tab.

rchaud 304 days ago | |

If there's an app that started life in the browser, a desktop/native app can only make it worse. I don't use native apps for Youtube, Amazon, Slack etc for this purpose.

runjake 304 days ago | |

Notion and all these kinds of apps are available for Linux. But yeah, I don't recommend using them. Just use them in the browser.

whalesalad 304 days ago | | |

There is no "native" app for Linux.

lion__93332 304 days ago |

This is so frustrating.

scblzn 304 days ago |

A reminder that Notion still operates under the .so TLD [1]

Why should you entrust them with your private notes and data?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113444

catapart 304 days ago |

yuck.