Earkeep
Is it legal to record a meeting?
Last updated: · Reviewed quarterly
It depends on where everyone in the meeting is sitting, and often on more than one answer at once. This is a reference for the two places our readers work: the fifty US states plus the District of Columbia, and the thirty-two countries of the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. One page each, stating the rule, the statute it comes from, and what you have to say.
This is not legal advice
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 these pages cannot tell you whether a particular recording is lawful. Every entry is a summary of a statute, not a substitute for reading it, and where the sources disagree the page says so instead of picking a side. If the answer matters, ask someone who can be held to their answer.
The answer depends on where everyone is, not just where you are
A distributed team is never in one jurisdiction, so a single-jurisdiction answer is almost never the whole answer. There is no rule anywhere that settles which law applies to a call spanning two of them, and courts have reached different results on similar facts. More than one law can reach the same conversation at once, which is what produces a real conflict rather than a gap.
The working convention is to follow the strictest participant's rule, and it is worth being honest that this is prudential guidance rather than a rule of decision. No court has adopted "strictest wins" as law. What supports it is simpler: satisfying the strictest candidate satisfies all of them, and the cost of doing so is one sentence at the top of the meeting. If any participant might be somewhere that requires everyone's agreement, or you do not know where the participants are, ask everyone.
Recording is also not the only exposure. Most of these regimes make disclosing or using an unlawfully obtained recording a separate offence, so a transcript carries its own risk and a recording made in the wrong place does not become safe by being kept to yourself.
Two continents, two different kinds of question
In the United States, one binary per state
Federal law sets a one-party floor: if you are in the conversation, you have supplied the consent it needs. States can be stricter, and about a dozen are, requiring every participant to agree or at least to be told. A handful split by medium, so the same meeting can fall under two rules at once.
In Europe, a stack of four layers
National criminal law, then GDPR, then national employment law, then works councils. They apply at the same time and the binding one is often not the one people expect. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal the criminal layer bites first, and GDPR is not where the answer lives.
What almost every one of these rules is built around
The detail varies enormously. The mechanism varies much less. Nearly all of these regimes are built around the same idea: 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. It comes first, before the substance, because where a rule asks for information "at the time the data are obtained" or for prior consent, an announcement at the end does not comply. It asks a question, so an answer is on the record rather than inferred from silence. And it offers a way out, which is the part that makes the other two mean anything.
Two drafting points recur across the whole survey. "This call may be recorded" is materially weaker than "I am recording this call", because implied consent is not established by informing someone of the possibility of monitoring. And a written notice in a calendar invite is a supplement, not a replacement: we found no decision anywhere holding that a written notice establishes agreement where agreement is required, and at least one statute contemplates an announcement that is itself part of the recording.
Telling people you're recording has the scripts, the short and the long version, and what to do when somebody says no.
Where Earkeep sits in this
Earkeep records continuously and announces itself to nobody. There is no bot in the participant list and no banner on anyone else's screen, which means the only person who can tell the room is you, and the whole obligation rests on you saying so. That is worth knowing before you rely on the tool to disclose anything, because it does not.
It does not make a recording lawful. No tool can. What it does is remove the two excuses that usually sit behind saying nothing: that there was nothing to press, and that there would be nothing to do if someone objected. There are three ways to stop, and each is meant to be used in front of the person who asked. A pause from the live edge releases the microphone and the system audio stream, so your operating system's own recording indicator goes dark and the person across the table can watch the light go out. Any event on a connected calendar can be marked never-record. And a stretch of the day, a saved meeting or a whole day can be purged from the file afterwards.
On the question of where the audio goes, the answer is short: nowhere. Transcription runs on your own device, the audio is never written to disk at all, and what is kept is text in a folder you choose. That is a data protection argument and nothing else. Where the law makes an unconsented recording an offence, it is the same offence whether the audio was processed on your laptop or in someone's cloud, and a page that suggests otherwise would be telling you something dangerous.
Related
- Telling people you're recording: what to say before the meeting starts, and how pausing, never-record meetings and purging work.
- Private by design: why the audio never leaves your computer and is never written to disk.
- Always-on capture: why there is no record button, and how the three controls fit around it.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to record a meeting you are part of?
In most of the United States and in about twenty of the thirty-two European countries surveyed here, yes, because you are one of the parties and the rule is written around recording other people's conversations. In roughly a dozen European countries and in about a dozen US states it is not, and the other speakers have to agree first. The two region pages say which is which.
Which law applies if the people on the call are in different places?
Possibly more than one at once, and there is no rule that settles it. Courts have gone both ways on comparable facts, applying sometimes the law where the recorder sits and sometimes the law where the recorded person sits. The only posture that satisfies every candidate is to tell everyone and get their agreement, which is why the convention is to follow the strictest participant's rule.
Does it help that Earkeep never uploads the audio?
For the data protection layer, genuinely yes: there is no transfer, no third party in the chain and no server copy. For the criminal layer, no. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal a recording made without the other speakers' consent is the same offence whether it was processed locally or in a cloud. Consent law is about the recording, not about where it is stored.
Is a line in the calendar invite enough?
We can't tell you that, and we would be careful about assuming it. In our reading we found no decision holding that a written notice establishes agreement where agreement is required, and Washington's statute contemplates an announcement that is itself recorded, which a written line cannot be. The invite line is worth having because it gives people advance warning and leaves a record that notice was given. Say it out loud as well.
Ask the room, then keep the answer
14-day full trial, no account required.