Is it legal to record a meeting in Austria?

StGB § 120, Mißbrauch von Tonaufnahme- oder Abhörgeräten. § 120(1) punishes with up to one year or a fine of up to 720 daily units whoever uses a sound-recording or eavesdropping device to obtain knowledge of a non-public statement of another person nicht zu seiner Kenntnisnahme bestimmten, not intended for his own perception. § 120(2) punishes whoever, without the speaker's consent, makes such a recording accessible to a third party for whom it is not intended, or publishes it. § 120(3) makes it prosecutable only on the injured party's authorisation.

§ 119 and § 119a do not reach this either, for the same structural reason: both turn on a message or data "nicht für ihn bestimmten", not intended for him.

Austria frames all three offences around access one was not meant to have, not around recording another person's words. That is the opposite framing to Germany's StGB § 201, which protects the non-publicly spoken word of another full stop.

Two citation corrections worth carrying, because both circulate. "Missbräuchliches Abfangen von Daten" is the heading of § 119a, not § 120. And the works council provision is ArbVG § 96(1) Z 3, not "AVG", which is the general administrative procedure act and has nothing to do with works councils.

Criminally yes, and it does not help you much. A participant is by definition an intended addressee of what the others say, so their words are not nicht zu seiner Kenntnisnahme bestimmt and § 120(1) is not made out. Neither is § 119 or § 119a, because a participant on a video call is an intended recipient.

What § 120 does criminalise is the second step. § 120(2) makes it an offence to make the recording accessible to a third party for whom it is not intended, or to publish it, without the speaker's consent. So the criminal line in Austria is not capture, it is disclosure, and an export-the-transcript-and-send-it-round workflow crosses a line that recording never crossed.

The civil half is settled OGH doctrine, and it is the operative answer. Rechtssatz RS0031784, originating in OGH 9 ObA 215/92 and followed as recently as 6 Ob 53/25z: "Die Tonbandaufnahme einer geschäftlichen Besprechung unter vier Augen ohne Zustimmung des Gesprächspartners ist rechtswidrig. Die heimliche Aufnahme eines Gespräches mit dem Arbeitgeber durch einen in einer Vertrauensposition beschäftigten Angestellten begründet Vertrauensunwürdigkeit." The unlawfulness follows from the speaker's personality right anchored in ABGB § 16, the right to one's own word.

So Austria has the same Recht am eigenen Wort Germany has and reaches nearly the same practical answer, through the civil code instead of the criminal one. And for an employee, covert recording is a dismissal ground: that is the second sentence of RS0031784, and it is the one an Austrian reader in employment will care about most.

And the case law reaches the transcript, not just the audio. Rechtssatz RS0127498, OGH 4 Ob 160/11z: UrhG § 77, on the protection of private writings, applies by analogy to transcripts of covertly made recordings of confidential conversations, and the unlawfulness of the recording already indicates the infringement of the affected persons' legitimate interests, so the infringer must specifically plead and prove that higher-ranking interests entitled him to make the transcripts accessible to third parties. The transcript inherits the recording's unlawfulness, and the burden of proof is on the person who made it.

ABGB § 1328a is the damages route: whoever unlawfully and culpably interferes with a person's private sphere, or discloses or exploits circumstances from it, must compensate the resulting damage.

No statutory announcement duty exists, and consent is effectively required anyway, because RS0031784 makes recording without the conversation partner's Zustimmung civilly unlawful. The word the OGH contrasts Zustimmung with is heimlich, covert, which strongly suggests covertness is the trigger.

Use the long form and get an answer.

Kurz vorab: Ich zeichne dieses Gespräch auf, um daraus im Nachhinein meine Notizen zu schreiben. Die Aufzeichnung läuft ausschließlich auf meinem Rechner, sie wird lokal in Text umgewandelt und nicht hochgeladen; die Tonaufnahme selbst wird nicht gespeichert, nur der Text, in einer Datei, die bei mir bleibt. Ist das für alle in Ordnung? Wenn jemand nicht möchte, sagt es jetzt, dann schalte ich es aus.

On whether continuing to speak after an announcement amounts to Zustimmung, and on whether a calendar-invite line suffices, no authority was found. We are not going to guess.

GDPR applies as well, and the analysis is the ordinary European one: a meeting recording is personal data about every identifiable speaker, a transcript without speaker labels is still personal data, the household exemption is read narrowly and a work meeting has a direct connection to a professional activity, you need a lawful basis, and Art. 13 wants the information at the time the data are obtained, which for an always-on recorder means before the substance of the meeting. The European framework covers all of that once rather than on every country page.

ArbVG § 96(1) Z 3 is the hard requirement, and it is a consent right rather than a consultation right. The following measures require, for their legal effectiveness, the consent of the works council: the introduction of control measures and technical systems for monitoring employees, in so far as those measures touch upon Menschenwürde, human dignity.

Two things follow. The sanction is unusually sharp: without the works council's consent the measure is not merely unlawful, it is without legal effect. And because it is consent rather than consultation, the Betriebsrat can simply refuse. In practice a continuously recording transcriber is the paradigm case of a system touching human dignity, so an Austrian rollout is blocked without a Betriebsvereinbarung. That characterisation is established Austrian doctrine rather than something we verified against case law.

One provision restricting audio specifically, and the surprise is that it stops short of audio. Austria's DSG § 12(4) Z 2 bans outright "eine Bildaufnahme zum Zweck der Kontrolle von Arbeitnehmern", image capture for the purpose of monitoring employees. But § 12(1) defines a Bildaufnahme as image processing, adding that "Zur Bildaufnahme gehören auch dabei mitverarbeitete akustische Informationen": sound is in scope only as something processed along with an image capture. Audio alone is not a Bildaufnahme, so the flat statutory ban does not reach an audio-only transcriber, and the question falls back to GDPR Art. 6 plus ArbVG § 96(1) Z 3. An audio-only tool escapes Austria's one categorical prohibition and gains nothing from that, because the works council consent right is the binding constraint anyway.

The Datenschutzbehörde has published no guidance document on audio recording that we could find. What it has instead, and it is better than guidance, is decisions.

DSB, 12 February 2025, GZ 2023-0.779.519, citing OGH 1 Ob 1/20h: "In diesem Zusammenhang hat der OGH bereits ausgesprochen, dass die Gewinnung von Beweismitteln für einen Zivilrechtsstreit grundsätzlich keinen gesetzlichen Grund für einen Eingriff in das Geheimhaltungsrecht darstellt. Heimlich angefertigte Gesprächsaufnahmen sind jedenfalls dann unzulässig, wenn sie nicht infolge eines sonstigen Beweisnotstands unbedingt benötigt werden."

Obtaining evidence for a civil dispute is in principle not a lawful ground for interfering with the right to secrecy, and covertly made conversation recordings are impermissible unless strictly necessary because of an evidentiary emergency. The complaint was dismissed on the facts, but the standard is the useful part and it is the DSB's own: covert is the problem, not recording. That is the strongest argument for announcing in a jurisdiction whose criminal code does not require it.

Start with what does not help, because it is what our own positioning tempts us into claiming. Earkeep transcribes on your own device, never writes the audio to disk and sends nothing anywhere. On the criminal layer in Austria that changes nothing at all. A recording made without the other speakers' consent is the same act whether it was processed on your laptop or uploaded to somebody's cloud, because the provision is about making the recording rather than about where it ends up.

Where the architecture genuinely helps is data protection: no transfer, no third party in the chain, no processor agreement to sign, and nothing to reconcile if someone asks you to delete what was said. And in the conversation itself, "it stays on my laptop and the audio is never saved" is a shorter thing to explain than what a cloud notetaker requires, which makes the agreement easier to actually obtain.

Earkeep announces itself to nobody. There is no bot in the participant list and no banner on anyone else's screen, so where the announcement is what makes the recording lawful, the whole of it depends on you saying something. What the app gives you is somewhere to go when the answer is no: a pause from the live edge that releases the microphone and the system audio stream, so the operating system's own recording indicator visibly goes dark; a never-record marking for a meeting on a connected calendar; and a purge that takes the lines out of the file on your own disk with no server copy anywhere. It does not make any recording lawful, and no tool can.

• StGB § 120, RIS
• OGH Rechtssatz RS0031784, RIS
• OGH Rechtssatz RS0127498 (transcripts), RIS
• ArbVG § 96, RIS
• DSG § 12, RIS
• DSB, 12 February 2025, GZ 2023-0.779.519
• GDPR, EUR-Lex

• European recording laws: the four layers, the controller question, and all 32 countries.
• Telling people you're recording: the scripts, and the three ways to stop.
• Private by design: why the audio never leaves your computer.

This page is legal information, not legal advice. It summarises provisions and guidance rather than replacing them, and we are not lawyers. If the answer matters, ask someone who can be held to their answer.