I just found out my 1:1s with my manager have been recorded for the last six months and I do not know what to do with that

We use a meeting transcription tool. It is fine, it works, it has been on most of our meetings since rollout. I assumed our 1:1s were not on the list because I had never received a transcript and the bot did not visibly join.

This week I needed to find a comment my manager had made in a 1:1 in February. I searched my email for the transcript. There was no transcript. I asked her if she had it. She said “let me check” and after a pause sent me the link to a shared drive folder I did not know existed.

The folder contained transcripts of every 1:1 we have had since November.

I asked her, as calmly as I could, when this had started. She said it had been on automatically since the company-wide rollout of the AI assistant in October. She did not know it had been recording these. She had assumed, like I had, that 1:1s were exempt.

They are not exempt. They are stored. The retention policy is “indefinite, in accordance with corporate records management policy.” I have asked. The records are accessible to HR, to legal, and to my manager and her manager. I have not been informed about any of this until this week.

What was in those 1:1s. I will tell you what I remember. I complained about a project I thought was poorly scoped. I told her I was thinking about whether the company was the right long-term fit. I asked her advice on how to handle a difficult conversation with a peer. I shared, twice, that I had been struggling with anxiety becuase of work pressure.

All of that is in a folder that HR can read. I did not know. My manager did not know.

She is more upset about it than I am. She has filed a question to our IT and legal teams to clarify what the policy actually is. She has not gotten an answer yet.

I do not know what to do. There is nothing in those transcripts that I am ashamed of. There is plenty that I would never have said if I had known they were being recorded indefinitely and were accessible to people I have never met.

If anyone here has dealt with this — discovering that internal recordings exist that you did not know existed — what did you do?