GDPR-Compliant Video Conferencing: What EU Teams Need to Know
GDPR applies to any organization processing personal data of EU residents — regardless of where the organization is based. For video meetings, personal data includes participant names, email addresses, IP addresses, and the content of meeting transcripts and recordings. A video meeting platform that stores or processes this data on behalf of an EU-based organization is a data processor and must meet GDPR requirements.
The GDPR checklist for video conferencing
- Data Processing Agreement (DPA): the platform must sign a DPA acting as your data processor. All major platforms provide DPAs.
- Data residency: GDPR does not require EU data residency, but it restricts transfers to countries without adequate protection. Platforms that store data in the US must use Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs).
- Retention limits: personal data should not be retained longer than necessary. Meeting transcripts and recordings need defined retention periods with automatic deletion.
- Data subject rights: participants may request deletion of their meeting data. The platform must support this.
- Consent for recording and AI processing: participants should be informed that their data is being processed for transcription and AI notes.
The AI processing complication
If you use a third-party AI notetaker bot, that tool is also a data processor under GDPR — one that many teams add without checking whether it has a DPA or stores data in GDPR-compliant regions. Using a meeting platform with native AI (like MeetOye) reduces the number of data processors in the meeting audio pipeline from two to one.
Self-hosting as a GDPR simplification
Organizations with strict data residency requirements can self-host MeetOye — keeping all meeting data, transcripts, and recordings within their own infrastructure. This eliminates the cross-border data transfer question entirely. Self-hosting requires infrastructure management but simplifies the GDPR compliance picture significantly for regulated industries.