Telling people you're recording

What you are allowed to record depends on where you are, where the other people are, whether it is a work meeting, and sometimes on whether your employer has already decided the question for you. We are not lawyers and this page cannot tell you whether a particular recording is lawful. If the answer matters, ask someone who can be held to their answer.

What it can do is describe the thing almost every one of those rules is built around, because they agree on the mechanism far more than they agree on the detail: the people in the conversation get told, before the conversation, and get a real chance to say no. A notice that arrives afterwards is not notice, and a chance to object that changes nothing is not a chance.

Three things make a spoken notice do its job, and all three are easy to leave out by accident.

It comes first. Before the agenda, before the small talk turns into the actual conversation. Where the rules ask for information "at the time the data are obtained", an announcement at the end is not compliance, and where they ask for agreement, agreement given after the fact does not cover what was already said.

It asks a question. A statement invites nothing. A question puts an answer on the record, so what you have is agreement rather than an assumption drawn from silence.

It offers a way out. This is the part that makes the other two mean anything, and it is the part that used to be awkward to offer honestly, because most always-on tools have no way to stop. Earkeep does, and it is the subject of the rest of this page.

Some places need everyone to agree, not just you. Where you are and where each other participant is can both matter, and on a call with people in several countries you may be dealing with more than one answer at once. This is the single question most worth checking for the places you actually work in, and it is the reason the long script above asks rather than tells.

Written notice is not obviously the same as being told. A banner on a screen, a bot in a participant list, a line in a calendar invite: these are what most meeting tools rely on, and in our own reading of the case law we could find no decision holding that any of them establishes agreement where agreement is required. Where a rule contemplates an announcement that is itself part of the recording, a notice nobody said out loud is a weaker thing than it looks. Saying it costs you one sentence.

An objection ends it. Whatever the notice said, if somebody says no, you no longer have their agreement. Stop recording. That is the case the controls below exist for.

Earkeep is always-on because remembering to press record is the thing that fails. It is not a trap. There are three ways to stop, and each is meant to be used in front of the person who asked.

Pause, from the live edge of the transcript. Fifteen minutes, thirty, an hour, or until you resume. Pausing releases the microphone and the system audio stream, so your operating system's own recording indicator goes dark. That is deliberate: the person across the table can watch the light go out instead of taking your word for it. A timed pause starts recording again by itself, so you cannot forget to turn it back on.

Mark a meeting as never-record. Any event on a connected calendar can be struck from the agenda, and Earkeep stops capturing for the length of it and starts again when it ends. This is the one for the standing meeting that should never be transcribed, so the decision is made once rather than every week.

Delete what was already said. Select a stretch of the day and purge it, delete a saved meeting together with its transcript, or remove a whole day. The lines come out of the file and nothing takes their place. Because the transcript is a plain file on your own disk and there is no server copy, deleted means deleted.

Stopping and deleting both leave no trace, which is worth understanding before you rely on it. A paused stretch and a purged stretch read afterwards exactly like a stretch where nobody spoke: no gap marker, no "paused here" row. Nobody reading the transcript later can see that a gap was chosen rather than quiet, and neither can you.

It does not tell anybody. There is no bot, no banner, and nothing in the participant list, which is exactly why people cannot tell they are being recorded unless you say so.

It does not make a recording lawful. No tool can. What it can do is remove the two excuses that usually sit behind not saying anything: that there was nothing to press and that there would be nothing to do if someone objected.

It does help with the part that is often the real worry, which is where the audio goes. Nothing leaves your device: transcription runs locally, the audio is never written to disk at all, and what is kept is text in a folder you choose. That is a genuinely shorter conversation to have with a room than the one a cloud notetaker requires, and private by design explains the mechanism behind it.

• Always-on capture: why there is no record button, and how the three controls fit around it.
• Private by design: why the audio never leaves your computer and is never written to disk.
• Calendar connection: connecting the calendar that the never-record list works from.