Is it legal to record a meeting in Germany?

StGB § 201, Verletzung der Vertraulichkeit des Wortes, violation of the confidentiality of the spoken word. § 201(1) punishes with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine whoever unbefugt, without authorisation, records on a sound carrier the non-publicly spoken word of another, or uses such a recording. § 201(2) covers listening in with a device and publicly communicating such a recording. § 201(3) raises the maximum to five years for public officials, § 201(4) makes the attempt punishable, and § 201(5) allows confiscation of the equipment.

Two things about that text decide the whole German answer.

A participant is caught. The offence is not about eavesdropping on someone else's conversation. It protects the nichtöffentlich gesprochene Wort eines anderen, the non-publicly spoken word of another person, and everyone in a meeting is speaking the words of another as far as everyone else is concerned. Being in the room is not authorisation.

Consent is the defence, because the operative word is unbefugt. A recording made with the agreement of every other speaker is not unauthorised, so it is not the offence. That is why the announcement matters here in a way it does not in the Netherlands or Poland.

Behind § 201 sits the constitutional Recht am eigenen Wort, the right to one's own spoken word, derived from Art. 2(1) with Art. 1(1) of the Basic Law. We have not opened the specific Constitutional Court decisions, so treat the doctrine as well-established in German practice rather than as cited here.

No, not on their own. This is the line that separates Germany from most of Europe, and it is worth being blunt about it, because the sentence "you are recording your own meeting, that is your business" is true in sixteen European countries and false here.

What makes it lawful is the agreement of every other speaker, obtained before the recording. Not announced and assumed: obtained. GDPR's separate test for whether consent is freely given does not govern this question, because criminal-law consent and GDPR consent are different things. A recording can be lawful criminally and still lack a valid GDPR basis, or the reverse.

Use the long form here, and keep the explicit question and the pause. The question is not politeness; it is what produces the agreement the criminal provision needs.

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. Ich verwende sie nur für meine eigenen Notizen. Ist das für alle in Ordnung? Wenn jemand nicht möchte, sagt es jetzt, dann schalte ich es aus.

In English, for a meeting held in English: Before we start: I record my meetings so I can write up notes afterwards. It runs on my laptop, the audio is transcribed on this machine and never uploaded, and the audio itself is not saved anywhere, only the text, in a file I keep. Is everyone alright with that? If anyone would rather I didn't, say so now and I'll turn it off.

A written line in the calendar invite is worth adding, because it gives people advance notice and leaves a record that notice was given. It does not replace the spoken question, and in Germany the spoken question is the part doing the legal work.

GDPR applies as well, on the same analysis as everywhere else in the EU: a meeting recording is personal data, the household exemption almost certainly does not cover a work meeting, you need a lawful basis, and Art. 13 requires 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.

What matters for Germany specifically is the ordering. Clear § 201 first. Nothing in GDPR authorises a recording that the criminal code prohibits.

This is where a German rollout actually stops, and it is a procurement question rather than a legal footnote.

Betriebsverfassungsgesetz § 87(1) no. 6 gives the works council a mandatory co-determination right over, verbatim, the Einführung und Anwendung von technischen Einrichtungen, die dazu bestimmt sind, das Verhalten oder die Leistung der Arbeitnehmer zu überwachen: the introduction and use of technical devices intended to monitor employees' behaviour or performance. The right applies to the extent no statutory or collective-agreement rule already governs the matter.

"Intended to" is read objectively. The Bundesarbeitsgericht reads bestimmt as satisfied where the device is merely capable of monitoring behaviour or performance, regardless of what the employer meant by it. An always-on transcriber is plainly capable. This is standard in German practice; the older authorities for it were not opened here.

Not storing the audio does not get you out of it. BAG, First Senate, 16 July 2024, 1 ABR 16/23, held verbatim that a headset system allowing supervisors to listen in on communication between employees is a technical device intended to monitor employees within § 87(1) no. 6. The device in that case let supervisors listen live and recorded nothing, which is exactly why it is useful here: co-determination attached to the listening capability, not to a surviving audio file. Two caveats. It is a headset system rather than a transcriber that discards audio, so it is an analogy and not a holding on these facts. And the works council actually lost, because the Gesamtbetriebsrat rather than the local council was the competent body for a company-wide system.

The council does not have an outright veto, and it is commonly overstated that it does. § 87(2) reads: where no agreement is reached on a matter under paragraph 1, the Einigungsstelle decides, and its award substitutes for the agreement. So an employer cannot introduce the tool unilaterally, the council can refuse, and the employer can take the disagreement to the conciliation committee, which can impose a settlement.

Readers ask about this constantly, so it is worth having and worth being careful with. Covertly made recordings are generally treated as unusable in German civil and labour proceedings, on the reasoning that admitting them would perpetuate the personality-right violation, unless an overriding interest applies. That is a well-established proposition in practice, but we have not opened the case law and would not present it as more than that.

Nothing we can cite. Germany's supervisory landscape is federal, with the BfDI, one authority per Land, and the Datenschutzkonferenz issuing joint positions, so "the German DPA says" is not a sentence anyone can write honestly. We did not find a specific published position on meeting recording in this pass, and we would rather say so than paraphrase something we have not read.

Start with what does not help, because it is the thing our own positioning tempts us into claiming. Earkeep transcribes on your own device, never writes the audio to disk and sends nothing anywhere. Under § 201 that changes nothing at all. A recording made without the other speakers' consent is the same offence whether it was processed on your laptop or uploaded to somebody's cloud, because the provision is about making the recording, not about where it ends up. Anyone who tells you local processing solves the German question is telling you something dangerous.

Where the architecture genuinely helps is the data protection layer: 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 to a German room 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 in the one country where the announcement is the criminal-law defence, the entire defence 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 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.

• StGB § 201, official text.
• BetrVG § 87, official text.
• BAG, 16 July 2024, 1 ABR 16/23.
• GDPR, for the layer that sits on top.

• European recording laws: the four layers, 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 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.