Is it legal to record a meeting in Italy?

Art. 615-bis, Interferenze illecite nella vita privata, punishes with six months to four years whoever, using visual or sound recording instruments, improperly obtains information or images concerning private life taking place in the premises indicated in Art. 614. Two limits are built into that: the information must concern private life, and it must be taking place in a dwelling or other place of private abode and its appurtenances. A business meeting in an office is arguable on both counts, and it would be wrong to imply Art. 615-bis covers every recording.

Art. 617 is the more important one, and it excludes a participant on its face: "Chiunque, fraudolentemente, prende cognizione di una comunicazione o di una conversazione, telefoniche o telegrafiche, tra altre persone o comunque a lui non dirette, ovvero le interrompe o le impedisce è punito con la reclusione da un anno e sei mesi a cinque anni." A conversation the recorder is party to is neither between other persons nor undirected to him. Art. 617-quater does the same job for computer and telematic communications, and likewise requires the interception to be fraudolenta.

A note on citation. Normattiva renders article bodies in JavaScript, so an automated re-check of these articles will fail even though the permalink lands a human reader on the right text.

Yes, and the textual argument is stronger than the doctrine usually cited for it.

The often-repeated position is that Italian courts treat a participant's recording as a lawful memorizzazione of a fact the recorder took part in, and admit it as documentary evidence. That is consistent with the words of Art. 617, but it remains uncited here: no Cassazione decision was opened in our research, so we are not going to present it as settled. Lead on the statutory words, which do the work on their own.

Nothing in Italian criminal law requires you to say anything as a participant. GDPR does, and it wants the information before the substance of the meeting.

Quick note before we start: I'm recording this so I can write my notes up afterwards. It transcribes on my laptop, nothing goes to the cloud, and I only keep the text. Say so now if you'd rather I didn't.

Longer versions, and what to do when someone says no, are on telling people you're recording.

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.

Statuto dei Lavoratori, Law 300/1970, Art. 4, as amended by the Jobs Act, and it is a procedural requirement rather than a balancing test. It also has a carve-out that is easy to miss and load-bearing.

Art. 4(1): audiovisual systems and other instruments from which the possibility of remote control of workers' activity also derives may be used exclusively for organisational and productive needs, work safety and the protection of company assets, and may be installed only after a collective agreement with the unitary or company union representation. Failing agreement, prior authorisation from the territorial or central office of the Ispettorato nazionale del lavoro, and those decisions are final.

Art. 4(2) is the carve-out: "La disposizione di cui al comma 1 non si applica agli strumenti utilizzati dal lavoratore per rendere la prestazione lavorativa e agli strumenti di registrazione degli accessi e delle presenze." The Art. 4(1) gate does not apply to tools the worker uses to perform the work.

Whether an always-on transcriber is a tool used to perform the work is exactly the contested question, and we are going to leave it contested. The Garante has read the exemption narrowly in practice, but presenting Art. 4(1) as applying automatically would overstate it. This is the one thing on this page we would publish as uncertain rather than as an answer.

Art. 4(3) applies to both routes, which is the part that is certain: information gathered under Art. 4(1) or 4(2) may be used for purposes connected with the employment relationship only if the worker has been given adequate information about how the tools are used and how checks are carried out, in compliance with the data protection code.

So the honest statement is: if the tool is treated as remote-monitoring-capable equipment rather than a work tool, a union agreement or an Ispettorato authorisation comes first; and either way the workers have to be told how it is used and how checks are made.

The Garante has been notably active on workplace monitoring and on AI, but we have no specific decision to cite here. One correction worth making explicitly: a €50,000 GPS employee-monitoring fine attributed to the Garante circulates in summaries of this subject, including an earlier draft of our own research. We could not find it. Do not publish it, including on our authority.

Because the binding layer in Italy is data protection rather than criminal law, this is where the product's architecture does real work. Transcription runs on your own device, the audio is never written to disk, and nothing is sent anywhere. There is no cloud component, so on our reading we are not a processor under Art. 4(8), which processes personal data on behalf of a controller and presupposes receiving it. That means no Art. 28 data processing agreement to sign with us, no sub-processor list, no international transfer and no transfer impact assessment, because there is no transfer. We found no decision squarely holding that an on-device-only vendor is not a processor, so that is reasoning you can check rather than a settled point.

What it does not do is disclose anything. There is no bot in the participant list and no banner on anyone else's screen, so the transparency obligation rests entirely on you saying something. Earkeep does not make anyone compliant and could not: a tool cannot be compliant, only a processing operation can be lawful.

Where it helps in the room is that stopping is real and checkable. 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. And a stretch of the day, or a saved meeting with its transcript, can be purged from the file on your own disk, with no server copy anywhere to reconcile against.

• Codice penale Art. 615-bis, Normattiva
• Codice penale (Art. 617), Normattiva
• Law 300/1970, Statuto dei Lavoratori Art. 4
• Garante per la protezione dei dati personali
• 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.