Is it legal to record a meeting in Spain?

Código Penal Art. 197.1 punishes with one to four years and a fine of twelve to twenty-four months whoever, in order to discover the secrets or violate the privacy of another, without their consent, seizes their papers or documents, intercepts sus telecomunicaciones, or uses technical devices for listening to, transmitting, recording or reproducing sound or images. Art. 197.3 raises the penalty to two to five years for disseminating, revealing or transferring to third parties what was discovered.

Two elements keep a participant out: the purpose element, to discover the secrets or violate the privacy of another, and the possessive in sus telecomunicaciones, their communications. A participant recording a conversation they are part of is not intercepting somebody else's.

Yes, and the authority is squarely on the point. Tribunal Constitucional STC 114/1984, of 29 November 1984, holds at FJ 7: "Quien graba una conversación con otro no incurre, por este solo hecho, en conducta contraria al precepto constitucional citado." Whoever records a conversation with another does not, by that fact alone, act contrary to the cited constitutional provision, namely the secrecy of communications under Art. 18.3 of the Constitution, because that guarantee runs against third parties rather than against the parties to the communication.

One caution for anyone relying on it. STC 114/1984 answers Art. 18.3, the secrecy of communications. It does not license everything done with the recording afterwards, and the intimidad limb of Art. 18.1 together with Art. 197 CP remain live for disclosure.

Nothing in Spanish criminal law requires you to say anything as a participant. GDPR does, and LOPDGDD Art. 89.1 makes the point explicitly for the workplace: information must be given in advance and de forma expresa, clara y concisa.

Antes de empezar: grabo esta reunión para redactar mis notas después. La grabación se hace solo en mi ordenador, la transcripción es local, no se sube nada a ningún servidor, y el audio no se guarda, solo el texto, en un archivo que se queda conmigo. Lo uso únicamente para mis propias notas. ¿Os parece bien a todos? Si alguien prefiere que no grabe, decidlo ahora y lo apago.

In English: 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.

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.

This is where Spain gets hard, and the operative provision is LOPDGDD Art. 89, not Art. 90. Article 90 is geolocation, and citing it here would be an error.

Art. 89.1 requires that workers and, where applicable, their representatives be informed in advance and de forma expresa, clara y concisa about the measure. Art. 89.2 provides that sound-recording and video-surveillance systems may in no case be installed in places intended for workers' rest or recreation, "tales como vestuarios, aseos, comedores y análogos".

Art. 89.3 sets a high threshold specifically for sound recording, and the words matter: such systems are permitted "únicamente cuando resulten relevantes los riesgos para la seguridad de las instalaciones, bienes y personas derivados de la actividad que se desarrolle en el centro de trabajo", only where the risks to the safety of installations, goods and persons arising from the activity carried on at the workplace are relevant, and always respecting proportionality, minimum intervention and the guarantees in the preceding paragraphs.

That threshold is directly hostile to an employer-deployed always-on microphone, and it is better to say so than to hope nobody reads it. Note-taking convenience is not a relevant risk to the safety of installations, goods and persons. That reading is ours rather than a holding.

Alongside it sits Estatuto de los Trabajadores Art. 20.3, which permits the employer to adopt the surveillance and control measures it considers appropriate to verify compliance with employment obligations, "guardando en su adopción y aplicación la consideración debida a su dignidad". Art. 64 on the works committee's information and consultation rights is relevant too, though we did not open it, so treat that reference as unverified.

Nothing we can cite. The AEPD has published material on workplace monitoring, but nothing specific was opened in our research, and we would rather name the gap than paraphrase something we have not read.

Because the binding layer in Spain 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.

• Código Penal (Art. 197), BOE
• STC 114/1984, Tribunal Constitucional
• Ley Orgánica 3/2018 (LOPDGDD), Art. 89, BOE
• Estatuto de los Trabajadores, BOE
• AEPD

• 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.