A Surprisingly Common Problem
Search any community where Fireflies.ai comes up and you'll find a recurring complaint: users who deactivated their account, disconnected the integration, or explicitly asked the bot not to join — and still found the Fireflies Notetaker appearing in their meetings weeks later.
This isn't an edge case. It appears frequently enough across Reddit, G2, and Trustpilot that it's worth understanding why it happens and what you can actually do about it.
How Fireflies Joins Meetings
When you connect Fireflies to your Google or Microsoft calendar, it monitors your upcoming events and automatically sends the Fireflies Notetaker bot to any meeting with a video conferencing link. This is the intended behaviour — it's how the "automatic" transcription works.
The problem arises because the calendar integration and the bot-joining logic operate somewhat independently. Disconnecting your account doesn't always immediately flush the queue of pending meeting joins. Deactivating doesn't necessarily remove the bot from meetings that were already scheduled.
The Auto-Share-to-All-Invitees Problem
A second, distinct issue: when Fireflies finishes a meeting, it can automatically send the summary to every person on the calendar invite. This includes:
- External clients or partners who never created a Fireflies account
- People who attended the meeting but didn't know it was being recorded
- Former employees still on recurring meeting invites
For internal team meetings, this is usually fine. For client calls, pitch meetings, or any conversation involving people outside your organisation, automatically emailing a Fireflies-branded summary to everyone on the invite — without you explicitly sending it — creates the impression that you configured this, even if you didn't realise that was the default.
How to Actually Stop Fireflies From Joining
- Disconnect the calendar integration first — don't just deactivate, fully remove calendar access from both Fireflies and your Google/Microsoft account settings
- Check for pending scheduled meetings — Fireflies may have already queued joins for upcoming meetings; check your Fireflies dashboard for any pending recordings
- Revoke app permissions directly — go to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 app permissions and revoke Fireflies' access at the account level
- Contact Fireflies support explicitly — document the request in writing so you have a record if the bot continues to appear
- Notify your meeting participants — if the bot has been joining external calls, let clients or partners know and confirm no recordings were retained
What Opt-In Meeting Joining Actually Looks Like
The better model — and the one that avoids this class of problem entirely — is requiring an explicit action before any meeting is recorded. Paste a link, click a button, confirm the recording is intended. Automatic calendar monitoring is convenient, but it creates exactly the control problem described above.
Beaver joins meetings when you tell it to: paste your Google Meet or Microsoft Teams link, and Beaver joins that specific meeting. Or connect Google Calendar and Beaver monitors your schedule — with a per-meeting opt-out on your dashboard before any call starts. Nothing records without your intention. Try it free.
