For Whom the Jott Notes

For about a month now, I have been using a service called Jott on and off. It’s proven to be a really handy service – at least, it was before I made the decision to purchase a Moleskin notebook and make my notes on real paper.

How it works is, you sign up for an account, put in your phone number, and add their toll free number to your phone. Whenever you need to make a note to yourself, you simply call the number and say your note (I.e., “Check out that great Hemmingway novel”). A few minutes later, you’ll receive an email with your transcribed note. It was really handy when I needed to remember something and couldn’t write it down, like when driving.

To test out the service, I initially made some really, well, weird notes. Yet I was continually impressed with the accuracy of the speech-to-text engine they used to transcribe my notes. Or so I thought …

This morning I caught a paragraph length blurb recommending Jott, in the Boston Globe. Yet in that paragraph, they mentioned that it was actually people overseas who transcribe my notes! I immediately felt as if my privacy was violated, although it’s entirely possible this was in one of those ten page long agreements in a ten row long box that you simply click “Agree” to.

The problem I see is that it doesn’t seem entirely unlikely for someone to use this service to record something confidential, and have the transcriber somehow use that information. I know I will definitely hesitate to use the service for anything but the most generic of messages from this point forward – and not only because I have a beautiful notebook to put it all in instead.