Is it legal to record a meeting in Greece?

Ποινικός Κώδικας Art. 370Α, on the confidentiality of telephone communication and oral conversation, as enacted in 2019. Paragraph 2, verbatim in translation: "Whoever unlawfully monitors by special technical means, or records on a material medium, an oral conversation between third parties that is not conducted publicly, or records on a material medium a non-public act of another, is punished with imprisonment of up to ten (10) years. The act of the preceding sentence is punished with the same penalty also where the perpetrator records on a material medium the content of his own conversation with another without the express consent of the latter."

Paragraph 1 does the same for telephone communications, again extending the ten-year maximum to a party who records the content of his own communication without the other's ρητή συναίνεση. Paragraph 3 is a separate offence with the same penalty for anyone who makes use of the information or of the medium on which it was recorded. Paragraph 4 adds a fine and reaches anyone acting as a private investigator, professionally or for a fee.

The framing is both. The first sentence of each paragraph is a classic eavesdropping offence aimed at others' conversations. The second sentence of each is an express, deliberate extension to a participant. Greece has not left the question to inference in either direction.

Two sourcing cautions. The official gazette's download endpoint redirects in a loop, so this text was read from a codified commercial database rather than from the gazette, and it should be checked against ΦΕΚ Α΄ 95/2019 before anyone relies on the exact wording. And a search for the Greek criminal code will often return the pre-2019 code, whose Art. 370Α is worded almost identically but is no longer in force. Do not cite that one.

No, not without the express consent of the other speaker or speakers. On the face of the text this is the strictest position in Europe, and stricter than Switzerland's, both because the maximum penalty is κάθειρξη, felony-grade imprisonment of up to ten years, and because merely using the recording is separately punished at the same level under paragraph 3.

One hedge, and it matters in both directions. Greek criminal law has general justifications, notably lawful exercise of a right and the necessity provisions, and it is widely reported in Greek practice that a recording made by a participant to protect a legitimate interest may be justified and may be admitted in evidence. No decision was opened in our research and nothing about that line is verified here. So: a ten-year sentence is not the routine outcome, and the justification defence is not something to rely on. The statute says what it says, and the exceptions are litigated.

Greece is the one country in this survey where the statute answers the question directly. The text requires ρητή συναίνεση, express consent. Implied consent inferred from someone continuing to speak after an announcement is not what the statute asks for, and a calendar-invite line is not express consent either.

No authority was found on what form express consent must take, whether it can be given orally at the start of a call, or whether a recorded verbal yes is itself lawful to capture. Because paragraph 3 makes use a separate offence, consent should cover the use as well as the recording.

Use the long form, ask the question and wait for an audible answer from each person.

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. I use it for my own notes and nothing else. Is everyone alright with that? If anyone would rather I didn't, say so now and I'll turn it off.

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.

Not verified, and this is the largest gap on this page. Greece has works councils under Ν. 1767/1988 with information and consultation rights, and general employee-monitoring constraints flow from GDPR plus the regulator's long-standing position on employee data. Neither the statute nor any guidance was opened in our research, so we state no provision, threshold or trigger.

What can be said with confidence is that in Greece the employer question is second-order: Art. 370Α already bites on the individual, so an employer cannot fix the position by consulting anyone.

The Hellenic Data Protection Authority. Nothing found, in the sense that no specific guidance or decision on meeting recording was opened in our research. That is a gap, and we would rather name it than paraphrase something we have not read.

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 Greece 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.

• Ποινικός Κώδικας Art. 370Α (codified commercial database)
• Εθνικό Τυπογραφείο, the official gazette (download endpoint redirects in a loop)
• Hellenic Data Protection Authority
• 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.