What Fathom actually does with your data

What AI is in it?

• Recording, transcripts and summaries. Joins your Zoom, Teams or Google Meet calls, records them, transcribes them and sends a summary afterwards. The free plan includes unlimited recordings, which is exactly why it spreads.
• Ask Fathom. A chat assistant that answers questions across your recorded calls, using what people said in your meetings as its source. Limited on the free plan, fuller on paid.

Where is your data processed?

The US, via three AI companies.

Fathom is plain about geography: "All Fathom data is stored in the United States." There is no UK or European residency option that I have found, so transfers rest on the usual paperwork, standard contractual clauses plus the UK extension to the EU and US Data Privacy Framework.

And what was said in your meeting is processed not just by Fathom but by its named AI sub-processors, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, under Fathom's agreements with them.

Can your organisation turn it off?

Not for free accounts.

If a member of staff installs free Fathom there is nothing for your organisation to control: the recordings sit in their personal account, kept indefinitely by default, and nobody else can see, manage or delete them.

Fathom's terms also put the legal duty squarely on that person, who warrants that "you have obtained the required consent of every meeting participant to record each call before the call begins".

Fathom always shows some notice in the meeting, a banner or a visible notetaker participant, but the advance consent email to attendees is a toggle someone has to turn on. Organisation settings, retention periods and team wide consent requests all exist, on the Team edition.

What to check this week

1. Find out who is already using it. Fathom shows up in meetings, as a notetaker participant or a recording notice, and colleagues will have seen it. Ask directly. Free installs are individual decisions, so no licence list will tell you.
2. Turn off model training on any account that stays. The opt out for Fathom training its models on de-identified meeting data lives in account settings. Make flipping it part of setting up, not something people discover later.
3. Decide the meeting rule, and where recordings live. Name the meetings AI never attends: safeguarding, casework, supervision, HR. If Fathom earns a place, put it on the Team edition, with organisation settings, retention rules and consent requests, rather than on personal free accounts.