Recording your calls to cut short videos from them: the idea is appealing until you think of your clients. That is when the objections come, and they are always the same three. We have heard them often enough to take them seriously, and to answer them straight.
First, a word on what we are talking about. Dailies is a Chrome extension that records the video calls you hold in Chrome, on Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Zoom, and cuts up to eight captioned vertical shorts per call from them. It handles calls in French and in English.
“What I say on a call belongs to my clients”
The objection is right on one point: your client paid for an answer to their own situation. Their figures, their organisation, the recommendation you make to them are not yours, and none of it belongs in a public video.
But that is not what a short sets out to show. In an hour of call, you say two kinds of things. Some hold only for this client: “with you, the problem comes from the follow-up”. Others hold for everyone: “a quote with no end date never gets signed”. The second kind, you repeat from one client to the next. They are your trade, not somebody’s file.
That is the sorting Dailies does. It reads the whole call and, for every passage, rates two things: whether it makes sense once it is out of the call, and what it reveals that is private or confidential. A passage that reveals something is turned down, however good it is. We describe what a passage that stands on its own looks like in How to choose video clips.
That sorting is a model’s judgement, not a guarantee. It can be wrong. That is why three things stay in your hands:
- Nothing is posted for you. The shorts are proposed to you. You download the ones you want, and a short you do not download goes nowhere.
- You say what must not go out. When a short does not suit you, you say why. Dailies turns that into an instruction, for instance to stop proposing passages on a subject or about a client, and applies it to your following calls. You find those instructions in your settings and can remove them.
- Your contract remains the rule. If a confidentiality clause covers your exchanges, it applies to what you post, short or not. This article is not legal advice: if in doubt, read your contract again or ask your client.
“Nobody must know I work with them”
Many engagements are not made public. The client does not want it known that they are being advised, or by whom.
In your shorts, one switch blurs your guests and disguises their voice. On a new account, it is on from the start: showing someone is your decision to make, not the other way round. A short mostly shows you, explaining; when your guest’s question opens the short, they are blurred, and heard in another voice.
The blur has a limit, and it is better to know it: it hides a face and a voice, not what is said. If you say your client’s name, or describe their company in a way that makes it recognisable, the passage points to them all the same. The sorting described above turns those passages down, but the last look is yours. One simple rule is enough: post only the shorts where you talk about method. A piece of advice on how to set a price does not say who you gave it to.
That leaves the recording itself. Telling your guests that the call is recorded is up to you, before you begin. We explain how to say it without weighing the call down.
“All my calls will end up on a server”
Yes, a recorded call reaches our servers: we have to receive it to cut shorts from it. The real question is what stays there, and for how long.
- You choose the calls. Nothing starts by itself: you start the recording, call by call. A call you do not record does not exist for Dailies.
- The original files do not stay. The original files of a processed call, sound and picture, are deleted 10 days after processing, 15 days at the latest. A call left unprocessed is deleted 30 days after the call.
- What stays is what your shorts are made of. The only pieces of video they use, a few dozen seconds each, their cover pictures, and the call’s transcript.
- You can delete everything. Deleting a call erases its files, its transcript and its shorts from our servers. You can do it at any time.
- Nothing is used for anything else. Your recordings train no model, neither ours nor anyone else’s.
During the call, the recording is never written to your computer’s disk, and it travels encrypted to our servers. Our privacy policy says who hosts what, and for how long.
No online service can promise that a leak is impossible, and we do not promise it. What can be done is to keep less, for less time: what has been deleted can no longer leak.
The calls not to record
Some calls lend themselves to none of this, and the best thing is not to record them:
- those covered by a duty of professional secrecy, and health consultations: Dailies does not support them;
- job interviews: a candidate is in no position to refuse;
- negotiations, and calls where nothing said matters to anyone but the person in front of you: there is nothing in them that can be posted.
The others, the ones where you explain your trade to someone who needs it, are the calls our pages for consultants, coaches and freelancers are about.
Key takeaways
- What speaks of a client’s situation is not for posting. What you tell all your clients is your trade.
- Dailies turns down the passages that reveal something private. That is a judgement, not a guarantee: watch every short.
- A short that is proposed is not a short that is posted. Nothing goes out without you.
- One switch blurs your guests and disguises their voice. The blur does not hide what is said.
- A call’s original files are deleted 10 days after processing, 15 days at the latest.
- Your contract with your client comes before everything else.