Overview of Read AI
Read AI is trusted by Fortune 500 companies, platforms, governments, NGOs, thousands of organizations and millions of individual users.
Read AI's mission is to make every human interaction meaningfully better, smarter, and happier starting with the hundreds of millions of people worldwide using video conferencing, email, messaging, and calendars.
Read AI was founded with a privacy and transparency first approach to measurement, aligning with the founders' past experiences at Placed, Foursquare, and Snapchat.
- Overview of Read AI
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Privacy
- Does Read use customer data to train AI models?
- Does Read disclose customer data to third parties?
- Who can see my data? Is my data confidential?
- Can employees see my data?
- Deleting data
- Deleting data at the request of corporate IT
- Deleting your account
- Deleting your meeting report
- Deleting a Read meeting report owned by someone else
- Identifying Read users
- Security & Compliance
Please visit Read's Trust Center for a copy of Read's SOC 2 Type 2 report, Data Processing Agreement, or other forms.
Read is a participant of the Data Privacy Framework program, which can be confirmed by searching for "Read AI" here: https://www.dataprivacyframework.gov/list.
How can I (or how did I) create an account?
Creating an account with Read is a process that requires the user to either login with SSO (e.g. Microsoft, Google; see How does single sign-on (SSO) work with Read?) or create a username and password. The onboarding process also requires a user to provide permission for Read to connect to their calendar.
You may have:
- Created an account at read.ai to learn more about Read, include Read in your next meeting/email/message, or were shared a report that requires an account to view (this requirement is set by the meeting report owner).
- Created an account for read.ai by installing the Read app, add-on, or extension on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Microsoft Edge, and Google Chrome.
All together, the full onboarding process requires several clicks and the user must consent to providing this access to Read. See more below:
You can visit our Account and Privacy Center to lookup your account and receive more information.
How can I centrally manage Read users under a corporate account?
Read provides a mechanism to centrally manage licenses, users, settings, and permissions via our workspace capability. Workspaces come included with any paid plan and are strongly recommended for any organization. This approach also simplifies billing to a single payment rather than handling payments across individual users.
- How do I start Workspace onboarding? (End-to-end guide)
- What is a Workspace?
- How do I set up a Workspace?
- What do Read's paid plans include for companies/groups in Workspaces?
- How does billing work with a Workspace?
- Workspace | Frequently Asked Questions
How does Read join meetings?
Integrating Read AI with your online meeting platform is as simple as connecting your calendar and then telling Read which meetings it should join. You don't need to download or install anything for Read to join your online meetings. If you'd like, you can also use Read's desktop app, mobile app, or browser extension.
When it comes to meetings, Read will never join a virtual meeting unless the following steps occur:
- User creates an account on Read
- User has settings in place for Read to join a meeting or manually adds Read to the meeting
In no instance does Read join random meetings. Read has to be added by a user who has been invited to the meeting for the purpose of generating a meeting report.
Notifications in meetings
When joining a meeting, Read will do the following:
- Request permission to join the meeting (varies depending on platform and settings; recording permissions may also need to be granted).
- After joining the meeting, there will be a visual indication that Read has joined. This will either be Read joining as a participant (which the host can remove at any time), or a Read logo in the right corner of the meeting window (which any participant can click and select ‘stop sharing’ at any time to remove Read).
- When applicable, Read will attempt to notify users via chat that it has joined the meeting. If chat is enabled for the platform, Read will also list the name(s) of who invited Read in the chat.
- Once Read has joined a meeting, users can opt out to remove Read from the meeting and delete all recorded data in a few additional ways (available options dependent on meeting platform):
- Type "opt out" in the chat.
- Click on the provided link to opt out.
- If the Read Native Integration for Google Meet (bot-less) is in-use, the user who invited Read can opt out by following the instructions at the bottom of Using Read's Google Meet Native Recording.
Advance Notice and Opt-Out: On paid workspaces (not Free or trials), workspace owners and admins can turn on Advance Notice and Opt-Out under Workspace Settings > Meeting Auto-Join Preferences. When it's on, invitees from outside your workspace get an email before the meeting letting them know it will be recorded with Read AI. If anyone opts out, Read won't record the meeting for anyone. See Advance Notice and Opt Out of Meeting Recording.
Stop Read from joining meetings
There are several ways to stop or control which meetings Read joins, see:
If you would like to delete your Read account, Read makes it easy to do so with the click of a button from your Account Settings page.
See these articles for more details:
- How do I delete my account?
- Why is Read still joining my meetings after I told it to stop or if I deleted my account?
Please note that due to Read's security policy, our support agents are not able to delete an account for you from a support request. Our policy requires that each user logs in and clicks the button themselves so that we know they are the account owner. Visit our Account and Privacy Center for assistance with deleting your account.
Finally, multiple people can invite Read to meetings. This can sometimes cause confusion if one person disabled Read and didn't expect it to join. Check the meeting's chat window for a message saying who invited Read.
Privacy
Read was founded with a privacy and transparency first approach to measurement. You can read more in our privacy policy and terms of service.
Does Read use customer data to train AI models?
The default is to opt-out, but users have a choice to opt-in to contributing their data into our models. You can read more in our privacy policy and terms of service. Contributing to our AI model is completely optional. We believe in giving you the power to decide how you engage with us.
Does Read disclose customer data to third parties?
Read does not share user data with third parties except as necessary to perform the functions of our business. For core business functions, Read may integrate customer metadata (name, email, etc) into systems like a CRM, email system or cloud computing provider, but Read does not share or sell this information for profit. A list of Read's subprocessors can be found here. You can read more in our privacy policy and terms of service.
Who can see my data? Is my data confidential?
Read does not publish data to the open internet, and by default, protects your meeting reports behind our account login system. Your data is kept private and only used to provide the service to you. You have full control of what gets shared with whom. You can read more in our privacy policy and terms of service.
As the owner of the meeting, you can control who the content is shared with. For example, you have the option to automatically share the meeting report with your participants or not to share with them. For details on managing your automatic sharing settings for upcoming meetings, see How can I manage sharing for upcoming meeting reports? For how to share or modify access to a report after it's been generated, see How do I share a meeting report after it is generated?
Can employees see my data?
Read uses a principle of least privilege. Under this policy, only certain internal technical staff may be granted temporary permission to access production systems in order to resolve operational issues or when otherwise granted permission by a user (e.g. via support ticket). In all cases, access permissions are logged and subject to both audit and automatic expiration.
Deleting data
Deleting your account or a meeting report where you are the owner will permanently remove all of your associated data from our servers, and this cannot be undone.
If you would like a meeting report deleted that you do not own, you can request report deletion directly via our Account and Privacy Center.
Deleting data at the request of corporate IT
Due to our privacy and security policy, we are not able to delete accounts or meeting reports at the request of a third party. If you need data deleted, you should contact the person who controls the Read account and ask them to delete it. (See How do I delete my account?) According to our terms of service, Read is a service provider, and the data belongs to them as a user of Read.
Deleting your account
Read makes it easy to delete your account with the click of a button from your Account Settings page. See these articles for details:
- How do I delete my account?
- Why is Read still joining my meetings after I told it to stop or if I deleted my account?
- Do I have an account?
You can also visit our Account and Privacy Center for assistance with deleting your account.
Deleting your meeting report
Meeting report owners can delete a meeting report:
If you would like a meeting report deleted that you do not own, you can request report deletion directly via our Account and Privacy Center.
Deleting a Read meeting report owned by someone else
If you would like a meeting report deleted that you do not own, you can request report deletion directly via our Account and Privacy Center.
Similar to Zoom, Google, Teams, and Webex and their record functions, the user/host determines when Read is activated. Read does not automatically join meetings without being invited by the user. Just like how a video conference recording is controlled by the user, the same is the case for Read.
Identifying Read users
Due to our privacy and security policies, we cannot disclose user information, nor delete or disable accounts at the request of third parties.
We recommend reaching out to whomever invited Read to your meetings (listed in the meeting chat) to ask they no longer invite Read (which they can do via Account Settings > Meeting Assistant > Join Preferences) or delete their account entirely (which they can do by clicking "Delete my account" at the bottom of their Account Settings).
Security & Compliance
Read uses industry best practices around security and has invested in regular SOC 2 audits and penetration tests. All data measured during video conference calls are encrypted during transmission and storage. Specifically, data captured is stored encrypted at rest within the AWS us-east-1 datacenter in Northern Virginia USA. (If you are considering a large group purchase and require data storage in another location, please contact our sales team to inquire about options.)
How long Read keeps your data depends on your plan and settings. On paid plans, reports are kept until you delete them, unless your workspace has a custom data retention policy. Within our settings, a user can determine whether audio and video is saved for playback. If a user chooses not to retain audio and video for playback, no audio or visual data is retained by Read beyond the duration needed to reliably produce the meeting report. In addition, the user has the ability to delete their account or any individual meeting report at any time.
By default all meeting data is set to opt out as it relates to improving the product. A user can opt-in, but requires manually going to the settings page and checking a box to contribute data to improve the product. Read uses AWS KMS and Secrets Manager to store keys and any pieces of sensitive application configuration. Access to each is determined per internal application/service and limited using a principle of least privilege.
Third party audit reports (e.g. SOC 2 Type 2)
Read has achieved Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 2 certification. This means we follow best practices when handling and safeguarding your data by using the appropriate encryption algorithms, access controls, and monitoring tools.
For a copy of Read's latest SOC 2 report, please see Read's Trust Center.
Encryption in transit and at rest
Read encrypts all data in transit with HTTPS with TLS 1.2, and encrypts all data at rest with AES-256.
User authentication and two factor authentication (2FA)
Every user with a Read account has the option to create an account using common SSO providers (Microsoft, Google, Zoom, etc), or by creating a username and password.
2FA can be set at the SSO level but is not enforced via username/password. If this is a concern, the organization can enable SAML authentication and domain capture. Please see below.
Additional security features in Enterprise+
Read's paid Enterprise+ plan offers several additional security features commonly used by large IT organizations. (More details in What are the different paid plans that Read offers?)
- SAML Authentication: integrate with SAML providers like Microsoft Entra or Google Authentication to allow for centralized management of your users. (See How to: Setup SAML Authentication with Read AI)
- SCIM User Provisioning: Automatically provision and deprovision users via an integration with your organization's identity provider (see Managing users and teams with SCIM provisioning)
- Workspace Audit Logs: get a structured stream of security-related events in your workspace, like logins, account changes, permission changes, and integration activity. Logs follow the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) and are sent in batches to a signed webhook, so you can send them to your SIEM. (See Workspace Audit Logs)
- Domain Capture: enabling this feature allows organizations to prevent users on their domain(s) from creating new Read accounts unless they are invited to the Read Workspace. This helps an organization to control access to Read and prevent Free accounts being opened "in the wild". (See Configuring domain capture for your Workspace)
- Data Retention Policy: automatically delete data after a certain number of days as specified by the organization. This is commonly used by organizations with compliance or tight security constraints. Enterprise+ workspace admins can set this up themselves under Workspace Settings > Settings > Advanced > Data Retention Policy. You can set different retention periods for different types of data, including meeting reports and Ask Read history. The policy applies to all reports in your workspace, past and future.
GDPR
Read AI is GDPR compliant.
- You can find a list of Read's subprocessors on our Trust Center.
HIPAA / BAA
Read offers a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to support HIPAA compliance. Due to the advanced security features required, this is only supported for users on an annual Enterprise+ plan, and it is required to set up both SAML authentication and domain capture for the workspace before proceeding with signing the BAA (see How to: Setup SAML Authentication with Read AI and Configuring domain capture for your Workspace).
If you are interested in a BAA, please contact our support team once you have purchased an Enterprise+ plan to proceed with next steps. If you'd like more information on the Enterprise+ plan and pricing before you proceed, please contact our sales team.