Akamai's privacy statement now has a section for recording your calls

The change

On August 18, 2026, Akamai published an updated version of its Privacy Statement, replacing the previous version dated April 13, 2026. Akamai is one of the largest infrastructure providers on the internet, so its privacy terms sit behind a large share of everyday web traffic and behind every sales, support, and procurement conversation its customers have with the company.

The update contains four substantive changes: a new section on call and meeting recording, new marketing data flows to resellers and partners, an expanded definition of service logs, and new language on partner processing.

What changed

1. Recording calls and meetings became a standalone practice.

Earlier versions mentioned call recording only in two scattered bullets about "Telephone Chat Data". Those bullets are gone. In their place is a new dedicated section, "Call and Meeting Recording", which states:

"it is our general practice to record and transcribe the calls and online meetings, especially in connection with service provisioning or marketing activities"

Transcription can be done by an automated service, including an AI transcription service. The data covered includes your voice, the content of the conversation, and anything shared in the meeting chat, including contact information and images.

2. Contact data can now reach resellers and partners for their own marketing.

Two additions work together here. The marketing section now says Akamai may process your data for marketing "if you obtain a service or product from one of Akamai's resellers", so buying through a reseller no longer keeps you outside Akamai's marketing scope. And the list of data recipients gains a new entry:

"We share some Contact Information with our business partners reselling Akamai services for their own marketing and lead generation activities"

The key words are "their own". This is not Akamai marketing Akamai. It is your contact details being used by partners for partner campaigns.

3. Service logs now explicitly cover AI tools.

The Service Logs definition previously described data from your sessions with a customer's websites, applications, and corporate systems. The new version extends the list to "websites, applications, corporate systems or AI tool". The statement also ties these logs to the Network Data and Threat Data categories defined in Akamai's Services Terms of Use, and adds that Akamai partners with third parties "for traffic and security analysis of Service Logs".

4. Some partner processing happens under the partner's own rules.

Where a partner processes personal data outside the specific enabled service, the statement now says the partner acts independently, as a controller in its own right, under terms agreed with the customer and under the partner's own privacy statement. At that point, Akamai's privacy commitments are no longer the ones that apply. Knowing which partners touch your data, and in which role, is the same discipline as monitoring the AI subprocessors in your vendor stack.

The consent condition

The new recording section comes with a genuine safeguard, and it deserves equal attention:

"We will only record and transcribe if all call and meeting participants consent."

On Akamai-hosted calls you choose between options like "Join and record" or "Join but don't record", and you can ask the host to proceed without recording at any time. On customer-hosted calls, the Akamai AI Notetaker Bot only participates if you let it into the meeting. The section also restricts Akamai's own vendors: service providers process recordings and transcripts on Akamai's behalf and "may not use your data for their own purposes".

Why this matters

Calls with an infrastructure vendor are not small talk. Sales and support conversations routinely contain roadmap details, security posture, incident context, and pricing. Under the new statement, the default expectation for those conversations is that they may be recorded and machine-transcribed, with a consent gate as the control.

The partner marketing change moves in a different direction. Contact details collected in one relationship can now surface in someone else's campaign, including when you never bought from Akamai directly. And the AI tool addition to service logs means that as companies put AI assistants and internal AI tools behind Akamai's platform, user activity in those tools falls within the logged data Akamai processes. Vendor documents are catching up to AI usage one clause at a time, the same shift we traced when Meta's privacy policy expanded to cover agentic AI.

Potential impact

For a SaaS company that uses Akamai directly or through a reseller, three practical questions come out of this update. First, are your teams aware that calls and online meetings with Akamai are recordable by stated general practice, and do they know they can decline? Second, which partners and resellers can now receive your contact data for their own outreach, and under whose privacy terms? Third, if you run AI tools behind Akamai services, does your own privacy documentation reflect that this activity can appear in a vendor's service logs?

The processor-side commitments sit in the data processing agreement in Akamai's Trust Center, which is the document to check these answers against. None of these questions appears in a dashboard. All of them come from a policy page that most teams read once, during procurement. That reading habit is exactly what made it easy to miss when GitBook deleted a one-sentence promise from its AI policy.

How Venpo detected it

Venpo runs continuous vendor risk monitoring on Akamai's legal documents. When the August 18 version of the Privacy Statement went live, the change appeared in Venpo's daily diff with every insertion and deletion marked, from the deleted "Telephone Chat Data" bullets to the two added words "or AI tool". The full redline is on the Akamai change page, and the vendor's monitored documents are listed on the Akamai vendor profile.

Business outcome

Teams that rely on Akamai found out about the new recording practice and the partner marketing flows on the day the document changed, with a plain-English summary of what moved and in which direction. The alternative is learning about a recording practice at the start of your next vendor call, or about partner lead generation when the outreach emails arrive. The same day-one detection is how LinkedIn's hard line between Recruiter and Sales Navigator reached the teams it affected. A repeatable workflow for this is in our guide on how to monitor vendor terms of service.

Key takeaway

Akamai wrote down two defaults in one update: conversations with the company are recordable as general practice, with consent as the gate, and contact data now has more exits toward partners and resellers. Both are stated plainly in the document, and what a document states is the part you can hold a vendor to, a distinction that also drove Perplexity's removal of three written protections from its privacy policy. The only hard part is noticing that the document changed.