Block read.ai and other bots from external joining participants

Question

We are seeing an increase with external attendees joining teams meetings and bringing in read.ai bot. We need a way to block this as well as other bots from external attendees from joining. This is a security issue for us and we can’t seem to find a solid answer on how to block and prevent.

Any insight or suggestions are appreciated

Answer 1

Hi @Austin Walls-Barcellos

According to the official documentation of Teams, the behavior of external access users is as follows:

Add, update, and delete apps for external access users

External access users can't add, update, or delete apps into any context, such as a personal, chat, channel, or meeting. They don't have access to the Teams app store of the hosting organization.

Usage behavior and policy for external access users

• People from other organizations adhere to the hosting organization's global (org-wide default) policy
• Users in the hosting organization can add apps in meeting chats with people from other organizations. People from other organizations can't add apps in meeting chats but can interact with bots, tabs and message extensions once added to the chat.
• After a bot is added in a meeting chat, it can proactively communicate with people from other organizations in that chat, and those people can communicate with bot.
• The data policies of the hosting organization are applied.
• The data sharing practices of any third-party apps shared by that user's organization are applied.

Therefore, if the organizer of the meeting has permission to the read.ai robot, external people in the meeting can also interact with it. As mentioned in "How do I remove or stop Read from joining meetings?": The Read Assistant (Read's meeting bot) will automatically join a meeting if there's a Read user that was on the call or was invited to the meeting, whose account was set up to add Read to the meeting. If this happens on all of your meetings, then it's most likely your own Read account that has the Assistant auto-join enabled; if it only happens on some meetings, it may be due to other people using Read.

If you want to prevent external attendees from using read.ai or other robots in Teams meetings, please refer to this document first.

In addition, it is recommended that you adjust Teams policies to restrict the behavior of external users, or select which groups or users to assign read.ai to in the Manage Apps.

If the above operations cannot solve your problem, please try to contact Read support to see if there is a better way. Thanks for your understanding and support

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