Meeting recordings and transcripts contain some of the most sensitive information your organization produces. From board-level strategy discussions to one-on-one performance reviews, the data flowing through Karnyx deserves the highest level of protection. This article explains exactly how we safeguard it.
Why Meeting Data Needs Special Protection
Think about the last week of meetings on your calendar. Odds are they included at least one conversation involving unreleased product plans, revenue figures, hiring decisions, or customer negotiations. Meetings are where the most consequential business discussions happen, and the transcripts that result from them are far more revealing than any single document or email.
Unlike a written report that is carefully drafted and reviewed, meeting dialogue is raw and unfiltered. People speak candidly about personnel issues, debate competitive strategy, and share financial projections that are not yet public. A breach of meeting data does not just expose information -- it exposes intent, disagreement, and context that was never meant to leave the room.
That is why we treat meeting data with the same rigor that financial institutions apply to transaction records. Every layer of Karnyx -- from capture to storage to search -- is designed with the assumption that the content it handles is highly confidential.
Encryption Everywhere
All data transmitted between your Mac and our servers is encrypted with TLS 1.3, the latest version of the Transport Layer Security protocol. TLS 1.3 eliminates legacy cipher suites and reduces the handshake to a single round trip, making connections both faster and more secure than previous versions.
At rest, every transcript, summary, and audio file is encrypted with AES-256 through AWS RDS and S3 server-side encryption. AES-256 is the same standard used by governments and defense organizations worldwide. Encryption keys are managed through AWS Key Management Service with automatic key rotation, ensuring that even in the unlikely event of a storage-layer compromise, your data remains unreadable.
At no point does your meeting data exist in an unencrypted state on our infrastructure. From the moment it leaves your device to the moment it is retrieved for display, encryption is continuous and non-negotiable.
Role-Based Access Control
Not everyone in your organization should have access to every meeting. Karnyx enforces this principle through a four-tier role system that governs what each user can see and do.
- Owner: Full administrative control including billing, organization settings, and the ability to manage all other roles. Typically limited to one or two people per organization.
- Admin: Can manage members, configure organization-wide policies such as retention and consent rules, and access audit logs. Cannot modify billing or transfer ownership.
- Member: Standard access to their own meetings, shared meetings they are invited to, and organization-wide meetings marked as visible. Cannot change policies or manage other users.
- Viewer: Read-only access to meetings explicitly shared with them. Cannot record, edit transcripts, or modify action items. Ideal for stakeholders who need visibility without full participation.
Every database query is scoped to the user's organization and role. A member in Organization A cannot access meetings from Organization B, even if they somehow obtained a direct meeting ID. Meeting visibility levels -- private, team, and organization-wide -- give meeting creators granular control over who can see their content.
Consent-First Recording
Recording a conversation carries ethical and legal responsibilities. Karnyx is built around a consent-first philosophy that puts control in the hands of both organizations and individual participants.
Our consent framework supports five distinct consent types: explicit opt-in, implied by calendar event, organization-wide policy, per-meeting prompt, and external participant notification. Administrators configure which consent types are acceptable for their organization, and Karnyx enforces those rules at the point of capture.
Before any recording begins, the consent policy is evaluated. If the configured consent requirements are not met, recording does not start. There is no override, no workaround, and no exception. The system is designed so that consent is a prerequisite, not an afterthought.
Consent can also be revoked after the fact. If a participant requests that their contributions be removed from a recording, the organization admin can process that request through the consent management dashboard. Revocation triggers deletion of the relevant audio segments and transcript sections within the configured retention window.
Data Retention You Control
Different organizations have different requirements for how long meeting data should be stored. A startup might want to keep everything indefinitely for institutional memory, while a healthcare company may need strict 90-day retention to comply with internal policies.
Karnyx provides configurable retention policies at the organization level. Administrators set a default retention period, and our automated cleanup process permanently deletes meetings, transcripts, and associated files once they exceed that window. Deletion is irreversible and applies to all copies, including backups within the retention cycle.
For GDPR compliance, any user can request a full data export or complete deletion of their personal data. Data export is delivered as a structured archive containing all meetings, transcripts, summaries, and action items associated with that user. Deletion requests are processed within 30 days and include a confirmation receipt once complete.
SOC 2 Readiness
We are building Karnyx with SOC 2 Type II compliance as a target from day one, not as a retrofit. Our operational policies and infrastructure decisions are aligned with the Trust Services Criteria for security, availability, and confidentiality.
This includes a documented incident response plan with defined severity levels and escalation paths, a change management process requiring peer review for all production deployments, automated daily backups with tested disaster recovery procedures, and a vendor risk assessment framework for every third-party service in our stack. We maintain internal security policies covering employee access, onboarding and offboarding procedures, and acceptable use guidelines. These policies are reviewed and updated quarterly.
Security is not a feature we add later. It is the foundation we build everything on. Every architectural decision starts with the question: how does this protect our customers' data?
What We Never Do
Trust is built as much by what a company chooses not to do as by what it does. We want to be unambiguous about our boundaries.
- We never sell your meeting data to third parties. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone. Your data is yours.
- We never grant third-party advertising platforms access to your content. There are no ad trackers inside Karnyx, and your meeting transcripts are never used for ad targeting.
- We never use your meeting data to train AI models. Our language models are trained on licensed and public datasets. Your private conversations stay private and are never fed back into any training pipeline.
- We never access your meeting content without authorization. Our engineering team cannot read your transcripts. Access to production data requires a documented justification, approval from a security lead, and an audit trail entry.
Our Security Commitment
Security is not a milestone you reach and forget about. It is an ongoing discipline that requires continuous attention. Our infrastructure is monitored around the clock with Sentry for error tracking and alerting, automated health checks that verify service availability every sixty seconds, and real-time anomaly detection on authentication and access patterns.
Every significant action within Karnyx -- login, meeting access, data export, role change, policy modification -- is written to an immutable audit log. These logs are retained independently of meeting data and are available to organization administrators for compliance reporting and security investigations.
We conduct regular security reviews of our codebase, dependencies, and infrastructure configuration. As we grow, we are committed to engaging third-party penetration testing firms and publishing the results of those assessments. Transparency is not just a value we state -- it is a practice we maintain.
Questions About Security?
We welcome questions about our security practices. If you are evaluating Karnyx for your organization and need more detail about our architecture, compliance posture, or data handling procedures, reach out to our team. We are happy to walk through our security documentation, discuss your specific requirements, and provide whatever context you need to make an informed decision.