Is it legal to record a meeting in the Netherlands?

Four articles, all of them opened and read in this research.

Art. 139a covers a conversation held in a dwelling, enclosed space or yard (een gesprek dat in een woning, besloten lokaal of erf wordt gevoerd), and criminalises two things done to it intentionally with a technical device: listening in other than at the instruction of a participant, and recording zonder deelnemer aan dat gesprek te zijn, without being a participant, other than at a participant's instruction. Up to six months or a fourth-category fine.

Art. 139b covers a conversation held elsewhere, and is narrower in a way that matters: it requires the act to be done heimelijk, secretly. Same participant carve-out, up to three months.

Art. 139c is about data rather than conversations, and it is the one a page about a video call should cite. It reaches tapping or recording data not intended for the person and transmitted by telecommunications or an automated device, and its second paragraph carves out recording "door of in opdracht van de gerechtigde tot een voor de telecommunicatie gebezigde aansluiting, behoudens in geval van kennelijk misbruik", by or at the instruction of the person entitled to the connection used, save in the case of manifest abuse. For a Teams or Zoom meeting, Art. 139c(2) is the relevant carve-out, not Art. 139a.

Art. 139e criminalises having available an object carrying data obtained by unlawful recording, intentionally disclosing such data, and making such an object available to another.

Yes, and it rests on the statutory words. Both Art. 139a and Art. 139b except the participant expressly, and there is a corollary worth knowing: because they except recording done in opdracht van a participant, a participant may also have someone else record for them.

But disclosure is where Dutch users get caught. Recording lawfully and then sharing the recording or the transcript can be an unlawful act in civil law and a GDPR breach, even though making the recording was no offence at all. Art. 139e reaches disclosure of data obtained unlawfully; the civil and data protection exposure for sharing a lawful recording is separate and does not depend on it.

Nothing in Dutch criminal law requires you to say anything. The transparency obligation under GDPR does, and it wants the information before the substance of the meeting rather than after it.

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.

For the Netherlands the point of emphasis is the second half rather than the first: the criminal layer is permissive, so data protection is the layer that actually constrains what you do with the transcript.

Wet op de ondernemingsraden Art. 27(1) requires the employer to obtain the works council's instemming, its consent, for a proposed decision establishing, amending or withdrawing certain arrangements. The relevant one is Art. 27(1)(l): an arrangement concerning facilities "gericht zijn op of geschikt zijn voor waarneming van of controle op aanwezigheid, gedrag of prestaties", aimed at or suitable for observing or checking the presence, conduct or performance of the people working in the undertaking. Note "suitable for": like Germany's BetrVG § 87(1) no. 6, capability is enough and intention is not required. Art. 27(1)(k) is worth citing alongside it, covering an arrangement on the processing and protection of employees' personal data.

It is not an absolute veto. Art. 27(4) lets the employer ask the kantonrechter for permission to take the decision anyway, and the court grants it where the council's refusal is unreasonable or the decision is required by compelling business-organisational, business-economic or business-social reasons. Art. 27(5) makes a decision taken without consent or that permission void, but only if the works council invokes the nullity in writing.

So the practical position: no unilateral rollout, a real council refusal to overcome, and a court route out of a deadlock.

Nothing we can cite, and we would rather say so. The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens has published material on monitoring employees, but nothing specific was reachable in our research: the landing page resolves and the employee-monitoring sub-pages returned 403 to every automated attempt. This is a gap that needs a human with a browser rather than a paraphrase.

Because the binding layer in Netherlands 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.

• Wetboek van Strafrecht (Arts. 139a to 139e)
• Wet op de ondernemingsraden (Art. 27)
• Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens
• 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.