Is it legal to record a meeting in Portugal?

Código Penal Art. 199.º, Gravações e fotografias ilícitas, unlawful recordings and photographs. Paragraph 1: whoever, sem consentimento, without consent, (a) records words spoken by another person and not intended for the public, mesmo que lhe sejam dirigidas, even where they are addressed to him; or (b) uses, or allows the use of, such recordings, mesmo que licitamente produzidas, even where lawfully made; is punished with imprisonment of up to one year or a fine of up to 240 days.

The two numbered offences are drafted differently, and the difference is instructive. Paragraph 1, recording, turns on sem consentimento and then removes the only escape a participant could have had. Paragraph 2, photographs and film, turns on contra vontade, against the will, which is a lower bar for the person taking the picture, because silence is not opposition. Its own participant clause, mesmo em eventos em que tenha legitimamente participado, confirms that the legislator thought about participants and set two different standards on purpose.

So for audio the standard is positive consent, and for images it is the absence of objection. An always-on transcriber is squarely in paragraph 1.

Two further points. Paragraph 1(b) makes later use a separate offence, even where the recording was lawfully made, so consent to record is not by itself consent to use. And paragraph 3 imports Art. 198, which makes prosecution dependent on a complaint: it is the other speaker who sets it in motion.

No, not without the consent of every other speaker. That is the strictest available reading and it comes from the statutory wording rather than from doctrine, which is unusual and makes Portugal one of the few countries where this question has a clean answer.

Consent, not merely notice, is what keeps the act outside Art. 199, because the offence is defined as recording sem consentimento.

No authority was found on whether that consent must be express or may be inferred from continuing to speak after a clear announcement, and none on whether a calendar-invite line suffices. Portuguese law carries neither France's explicit presumption of consent nor Greece's explicit "express consent" adjective, so this is a genuine gap rather than an oversight. Treat announce-and-pause as the practical minimum and obtained consent as the safe route, and do not rely on notice alone.

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.

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.

Portugal is one of the hardest workplace jurisdictions in Europe for this, and the sequence matters: a regulator decision comes before deployment rather than a DPIA kept in a drawer.

Código do Trabalho Art. 20.º(1) is close to a flat prohibition: "O empregador não pode utilizar meios de vigilância a distância no local de trabalho, mediante o emprego de equipamento tecnológico, com a finalidade de controlar o desempenho profissional do trabalhador." Breach is a contra-ordenação muito grave.

Art. 20.º(2) is the only way in: lawful where the purpose is the protection and safety of persons and property, or where particular requirements inherent in the nature of the activity justify it. Wanting better meeting notes is not obviously either.

Art. 20.º(3) gives the notice a statutory form of words, and it already names sound. The employer must inform the employee of the existence and purpose of the means used and post one of two prescribed notices, the second of which reads "Este local encontra-se sob vigilância de um circuito fechado de televisão, procedendo-se à gravação de imagem e som". Portugal is the one country in this survey where the workplace notice is prescribed and where the prescribed wording covers sound recording.

Art. 21.º(1) requires prior authorisation from the CNPD before remote surveillance means may be used in the workplace, granted only if they are necessary, adequate and proportionate. Art. 21.º(4) requires the application to be accompanied by an opinion of the workers' committee, or proof that the opinion was requested if none arrives within ten days.

One honest uncertainty: whether a participant-run transcriber is meios de vigilância a distância at all. That phrase was written for CCTV and we did not open the case law. An employer-mandated always-on transcriber almost certainly is; an employee's own tool is arguable.

The CNPD is a decision-maker here rather than only a guidance-writer, because Código do Trabalho Art. 21.º(1) makes its authorisation a precondition of a workplace rollout.

No specific CNPD deliberation on meeting recording or on local transcription was opened in our research, so we state nothing about its content. That is a gap, and a Portuguese assessment needs a real CNPD citation rather than a paraphrase.

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 Portugal 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.

• Código Penal, consolidated text (Art. 199.º), Diário da República
• Código do Trabalho, consolidated text (Arts. 20.º to 22.º)
• CNPD
• 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.