Is it legal to record a meeting in Luxembourg?

Not Art. 460. The official consolidated Code pénal was read in full: Art. 460 punishes suppressing or opening a letter entrusted to the post. The Code pénal contains no general privacy-recording offence at all.

The operative provision is the Loi du 11 août 1982 concernant la protection de la vie privée, Art. 2: whoever intentionally infringes the privacy of another's private life is punished with imprisonment of eight days to one year and a fine, "1° en écoutant ou en faisant écouter, en enregistrant ou en faisant enregister, en transmettant ou en faisant transmettre, au moyen d'un appareil quelconque, des paroles prononcées en privé par une personne, sans le consentement de celle-ci". Art. 3 covers placing a device, Art. 4 knowingly keeping, disclosing or using any recording so obtained, and Art. 5 montage.

The framing is around another person's words and that person's consent, with no "to which he is not a party" limb. That is the German and Swiss framing rather than the Belgian one.

Two caveats for anyone relying on this. The penalties are still expressed in francs: Legilux records no amendment and no consolidated version, so the 1982 text is what is in force, and we did not retrieve the conversion basis, so we are not going to state a euro figure. And in the official text the presumption sentence is typeset indented under limb 2°, while its own words are "les actes énoncés au présent article", which governs the whole of Art. 2 including 1°. No case law resolving that typographic ambiguity was found, and the whole Luxembourg recommendation rests on the presumption applying to 1°.

Only if the recording is open. Art. 2, 1° criminalises recording another person's privately spoken words without that person's consent, and being in the conversation is no defence because the provision has no participant limb.

The lawful route is the presumption: "Lorsque les actes énoncés au présent article ont été accomplis au cours d'une réunion au vu et au su de ses participants, le consentement de ceux-ci est présumé." Where the acts were carried out in the course of a meeting openly and to the knowledge of its participants, their consent is presumed.

That makes Luxembourg structurally the same as France. A silent always-on recorder is exactly the exposed case, and Art. 4 then bites a second time on keeping and using the file.

Openly, in a way the participants actually register. The statutory standard is au vu et au su de ses participants. No authority was found on whether express words are needed or whether continuing to speak suffices, and none on calendar-invite notice, which for a presumption framed around a meeting is a real gap.

Avant de commencer : j'enregistre cette réunion pour rédiger mes notes ensuite. L'enregistrement se fait uniquement sur mon ordinateur, la transcription est locale, rien n'est envoyé sur un serveur, et l'audio n'est pas conservé, seulement le texte. Est-ce que cela convient à tout le monde ? Si quelqu'un préfère que je n'enregistre pas, dites-le maintenant et je l'arrête.

What the CNPD adds is the mechanics of a free choice, and it is unusually concrete: the controller must let people decline without disadvantage, "par exemple, prévoir une possibilité de couper l'enregistrement lorsque la personne parle, ou bien ne pas enregistrer la réunion si tous les participants n'ont pas consenti". That is the closest thing in this whole survey to a product requirement stated by a regulator.

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.

The CNPD prior-authorisation regime is gone, and this is the most commonly mis-stated fact about Luxembourg. Art. 72 of the Loi du 1er août 2018 repealed the loi du 2 août 2002 outright, and with it the requirement to seek CNPD authorisation.

What Code du travail Art. L. 261-1 requires instead: mandatory prior information to the comité mixte, failing that the délégation du personnel, failing that the Inspection du travail et des mines, with four mandated contents including a formal undertaking by the employer not to use the collected data for another purpose. Plus an optional, staff-side request to the CNPD for a prior opinion within fifteen days, carrying suspensive effect for up to a month. Plus a complaint right that cannot be grounds for dismissal. The ITM is the third-rank recipient, never an authoriser.

The co-decision trigger is Art. L. 414-9, and it is a veto in all but name. In undertakings with at least 150 employees, decisions on the introduction or application of technical installations intended to check the employee's conduct and performance at their workstation must be taken d'un commun accord between the employer and the délégation du personnel. No unilateral rollout above that headcount.

The CNPD has a thematic page dedicated to audio recording of meetings, and on this research it is the first European regulator guidance specifically about recording meetings rather than about cameras, call centres or network traffic. Four things it says.

Luxembourg law does not address meeting recording directly, so the CNPD runs the analysis on GDPR plus case law. Consent is hard to obtain validly, "difficile à recueillir et à être valide dans la plupart des cas de figure", and for it to be free the controller must let people decline without disadvantage, in the concrete ways quoted above. Legitimate interest is available in principle and the CNPD names faithful transcription as a candidate purpose, but it reasons that necessity usually fails because equally effective less intrusive alternatives exist, expressly naming rapid note-taking techniques and automated transcription tools among them. And retention is tied to the minutes: recordings must be deleted once the minutes have been drafted, signed and approved.

One observation that is ours to make, stated carefully. A tool that never writes audio to disk satisfies the deletion requirement by construction rather than by a retention policy, and the class of tool the CNPD names as the less intrusive alternative to keeping audio, automated transcription, is the class this product belongs to. That is not an endorsement. The CNPD has expressed no view on this or any product, and nothing here should be read as suggesting otherwise. The CNPD's page also does not appear to address a continuously running recorder as opposed to a recording started for a meeting, which is a distinction that matters here.

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 Luxembourg 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.

• Loi du 11 août 1982 concernant la protection de la vie privée, Art. 2
• Code pénal, official consolidated text (Art. 460)
• Code du travail (Arts. L. 261-1 and L. 414-9)
• CNPD, enregistrement sonore des réunions
• CNPD, surveillance
• 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.