Is Connecticut a one-party or all-party consent state?

Criminally, §§ 53a-187 and 53a-189 reach a person not present at the conversation, who needs the consent of at least one participant. A participant is outside the offence.

Civilly, § 52-570d creates an action for illegal recording of private telephonic communications. It reaches telephone calls only; in-person conversations fall under the criminal sections. The word "private" imports a privacy element into the civil claim.

§ 52-570d(b) exempts law enforcement, safety agencies, recipients of threatening or repeated calls, carriers, broadcasters recording for broadcast, and the Secret Service.

§ 52-570d(a) names exactly three ways to record a private telephone call lawfully, and this is the most explicit notice provision in the country.

1. Consent of all parties, "obtained in writing or … part of, and obtained at the start of, the recording".
2. A verbal notification "which is recorded at the beginning and is part of the communication by the recording party". So a recorded verbal notice does suffice, on its own, without anyone agreeing.
3. An automatic tone warning producing a distinct signal "repeated at intervals of approximately fifteen seconds during the communication". A single beep at the start is not enough.

A written notice in a calendar invite is not one of the three. No authority treating it as compliant was found, and the written branch of the first mechanism requires consent, not notice. Note also that mechanism two, like Washington's, wants the notification to be part of the recording, which means the recorder has to be running before you speak.

RCFP reports the criminal offences as felonies punishable by up to five years and fines to $5,000. That rests on RCFP alone: the felony class could not be confirmed against primary law, so treat it as uncertain.

Civilly, § 52-570d(c) gives an aggrieved person an action for damages, costs and reasonable attorney's fees. There is a private right of action but no statutory dollar amount, so do not rely on any figure you see quoted.

No rule settles which state's law applies to a conversation spanning two of them, several may apply at once, and courts have reached opposite results on comparable facts. If anyone in the meeting is in Connecticut, the practical answer is to satisfy Connecticut. The general problem is on the US overview.

For a telephone call, the statute tells you what to do, so do that: speak the notification at the start, with the recorder already running so the notification is part of the recording.

This call is being recorded and transcribed for my notes. It stays on my own machine and nothing is uploaded.

No affirmative answer is needed for mechanism two, but asking is still worth doing, because someone else on the call may be somewhere that wants agreement rather than notice. Longer versions are on telling people you're recording.

Earkeep records continuously and announces itself to nobody: no bot in the participant list, no banner on anyone else's screen. Where every participant's agreement is what makes the recording lawful, that means the whole of the obligation sits on you saying something, and the app will not remind you.

What it gives you is somewhere to go when the answer is no. A pause from the live edge releases the microphone and the system audio stream, so your operating system's own recording indicator goes dark in front of the person who asked. A meeting on a connected calendar can be marked never-record, so a standing meeting is decided once. And a stretch of the day, or a saved meeting with its transcript, can be purged: the lines come out of the file on your own disk and nothing is written in their place, with no server copy anywhere. The one caveat is that it is not recoverable either.

None of that makes a recording lawful in Connecticut. Consent law is about the recording, not about where it is stored, so the fact that transcription runs on your own device and the audio is never written to disk is not an answer to the statute. It is an answer to a different and often more pressing question in the room.

• RCFP, Reporter's Recording Guide: Connecticut
• Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-570d (FindLaw)
• § 52-570d (Justia)
• MWL, Laws on Recording Conversations in All 50 States (last updated February 2022)

• US recording laws, state by state: the federal baseline, the cross-border problem, and all 51 jurisdictions.
• 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 statutes and cases rather than replacing them, and we are not lawyers. If the answer matters, ask someone who can be held to their answer.