Is it legal to record a meeting in Lithuania?

Art. 167, unlawful collection of information about a person's private life: "Tas, kas neteisėtai rinko informaciją apie privatų asmens gyvenimą, baudžiamas viešaisiais darbais arba bauda, arba laisvės apribojimu, arba areštu, arba laisvės atėmimu iki trejų metų." Whoever unlawfully collected information about a person's private life is punishable by community service, a fine, restriction of liberty, arrest, or imprisonment for up to three years. A legal person is also liable.

Art. 168 is the disclosure and use counterpart, reaching whoever without the person's consent publicly announced or used information about another's private life learned by reason of service or profession, or collected by committing an act under Arts. 165 to 167. Up to three years. Its third paragraph makes it a complaint offence.

Art. 166 is the third to know: whoever unlawfully intercepted a postal item, or unlawfully intercepted, recorded or monitored messages sent over electronic communications networks, or unlawfully recorded, listened to or monitored a person's conversations over electronic communications networks, or otherwise violated the inviolability of a person's communications, is punishable by up to two years.

The framing across all three is unlawful collection and unlawful recording. None of them is framed around non-participation.

Qualified, and this is where Lithuania differs from its Baltic neighbours. Art. 167 has no participation element and no secrecy element. Its two limiters are neteisėtai, unlawfully, and informaciją apie privatų asmens gyvenimą, information about a person's private life.

That structure means the criminal answer in Lithuania borrows its content from data protection law: process lawfully and transparently and the collection is not neteisėtai. It is the opposite of the Nordic pattern, where the criminal answer stands independently. It also means a covert recording is a live criminal question here rather than merely a civil one.

Art. 166 is a second and separate risk. A Teams or Zoom meeting is a conversation over an electronic communications network, and Art. 166 reaches whoever unlawfully recorded a person's conversations over such networks. The standard reading is that a participant does not violate the inviolability of their own communication, because the interest protected is the confidentiality of the channel between the parties and a party is not outside it. No Lithuanian authority for that reading was opened. Treat it as uncertain.

One asymmetry worth carrying: Art. 168 conditions liability on a complaint and Art. 167 does not, so collection is prosecutable without a victim complaint while disclosure is not.

Given Art. 167's structure, the safe route in Lithuania is express notice and express consent before recording starts, because consent is what makes the collection lawful and lawfulness is an element of the offence. Use the long form and get an answer.

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.

That recommendation comes from the statute's structure rather than from an authority. Nothing was found on whether consent can be implied from continuing to speak, and nothing on the calendar-invite form.

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.

Lithuania is the one country in this Baltic and Nordic set with a mandatory works council: the Labour Code requires a darbo taryba at employers above a headcount threshold, with information and consultation rights, and it also contains employee data protection provisions.

We did not open the Labour Code, so we are not going to print the threshold or the article numbers. This is a gap that a Lithuanian rollout needs filled.

Valstybinė duomenų apsaugos inspekcija, VDAI. We could not open it: every request returned HTTP 403, both to the site root and to the guidance index. So nothing is verified about what VDAI says on audio recording, and this is the largest single gap in the European half of this reference.

The official legislation database e-tar.lt also returned 403 throughout, which is why the statutory text above comes from the Seimas's own register of the same consolidated version.

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 Lithuania 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.

• Baudžiamasis kodeksas, consolidated text (Arts. 166 to 168)
• VDAI (returned 403 to every attempt)
• 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.