Is it legal to record a meeting in Switzerland?

StGB Art. 179ter, Unbefugtes Aufnehmen von Gesprächen: "Wer als Gesprächsteilnehmer ein nichtöffentliches Gespräch, ohne die Einwilligung der andern daran Beteiligten, auf einen Tonträger aufnimmt", and whoever keeps, evaluates or makes accessible to a third party a recording he knows or must assume was so made, is punished, on complaint, with imprisonment of up to one year or a fine.

The French version puts it even more plainly: "Quiconque, sans le consentement des autres interlocuteurs, enregistre sur un porteur de son une conversation non publique à laquelle il prend part".

Art. 179bis is the companion, and reading the two together is what makes the point. Art. 179bis covers fremdes, someone else's, non-public conversation, punished up to three years. Art. 179ter covers your own, punished up to one year. Switzerland legislated both sides on purpose.

No. Three details decide real cases.

Consent is the entire defence. Unlike Germany's unbefugt, Art. 179ter names consent expressly: ohne die Einwilligung der andern daran Beteiligten. Get it and there is no offence.

It is an Antragsdelikt. Auf Antrag means no prosecution without a complaint from an injured party, and any participant can lay one. That lowers the practical risk and lowers the legal exposure not at all, because the person most likely to complain is the person in the meeting who later fell out with you.

The second limb catches keeping and evaluating the recording, not just making it. Transcribing an unlawfully made recording is auswerten. A local-only pipeline is no defence to the second limb if the first was breached.

Art. 179quinquies does not help a meeting. Its exemption applies only to a participant or subscriber recording Fernmeldegespräche either with emergency and security services or in business dealings concerning orders, reservations and similar transactions, and only for the purpose of proof. The EDÖB reads that as confined to mass-market business under time pressure and says expressly that a complaint call or more extensive contract negotiations are not covered.

Switzerland is the one country in this survey where the regulator answers this directly, and the answer is unusually usable. The EDÖB: "Für die Nichtstrafbarkeit ist daher eine gültige Einwilligung zentral. Die Einwilligung muss möglichst klar und transparent über die Gesprächsaufzeichnung und den Zweck der Aufzeichnung informieren. Wichtig ist, dass die Einwilligung vor der Aufzeichnung eingeholt wird, damit eine betroffene Person der Aufzeichnung widersprechen kann."

Three drafting requirements and one concession follow. Express is not demanded, but informed and prior is. The purpose has to be stated, not just the fact of recording. And the mechanism the EDÖB describes is objection, so that a person can object before the recording starts, which is closer to announce-and-pause than to collect-a-yes. That is a meaningful softening of a strict provision, and it is the regulator's framing rather than ours: the EDÖB is not a court and Art. 179ter says Einwilligung, so do not treat silence as consent in Switzerland.

Kurz vorab: Ich zeichne dieses Gespräch auf, um daraus im Nachhinein meine Notizen zu schreiben. Die Aufzeichnung läuft ausschliesslich auf meinem Rechner, sie wird lokal in Text umgewandelt und nicht hochgeladen; die Tonaufnahme selbst wird nicht gespeichert, nur der Text, in einer Datei, die bei mir bleibt. Ist das für alle in Ordnung? Wenn jemand nicht möchte, sagt es jetzt, dann schalte ich es aus.

A calendar-invite line is not enough on its own, on the EDÖB's own logic: it does not create the moment at which a person can object before the recording starts. No authority was found on whether a calendar notice plus a spoken reminder would satisfy Art. 179ter.

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.

Switzerland has no works council in the German or Austrian sense, and it does not need one, because it has a flat prohibition instead. ArGV 3 Art. 26(1): "Überwachungs- und Kontrollsysteme, die das Verhalten der Arbeitnehmer am Arbeitsplatz überwachen sollen, dürfen nicht eingesetzt werden." Surveillance and control systems intended to monitor the behaviour of employees at the workplace may not be deployed.

And the EDÖB names automated analysis of employee speech as caught by it, which is about as close to this product category as any regulator in this survey has come: monitoring that controls employees' behaviour through detailed analyses of their activities, continuously, periodically or by sampling, is prohibited, and certain means breach that ban depending on use, "so zum Beispiel Mittel der künstlichen Intelligenz zur automatisierten Auswertung von Daten von Angestellten (Seh-, Bewegungs-, Sprach- oder Kommunikationsmuster, psychologische Ergebnisse)". The same page notes the Federal Supreme Court's GPS case: Art. 26 does not ban surveillance systems generally, only those intended to monitor employee behaviour.

OR Art. 328b adds the employment-law data limit: an employer may process employee data only in so far as it concerns suitability for the employment relationship or is necessary to perform the employment contract. A blanket day-long transcript of everything an employee says is a poor fit for either limb.

Employee representation exists and has no veto. The Mitwirkungsgesetz gives an information right under Art. 9 and lists four subjects carrying special participation rights under Art. 10, none of which is monitoring as such. The nearest hook is Art. 10(a)'s cross-reference to Arbeitsgesetz Art. 48, which gives employees or their representation a right to be heard and consulted before the employer takes a decision, plus reasons where the decision goes against their objections. A right to be heard, then, not a right to block.

The EDÖB, and it is the most directly useful regulator in this survey. Its page on recording conversations is explicitly about this subject, states that the data protection act and the criminal code apply in parallel, that criminal sanction and data-subject rights can both follow from the same unlawful recording, and sets the consent standard quoted above. It also publishes a schematic on the criminal and civil consequences of recording a conversation. Its separate page on technical means of workplace surveillance is the employer half, quoted above.

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 Switzerland 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.

• StGB (SR 311.0), Arts. 179bis, 179ter, 179quinquies, Fedlex
• EDÖB, Aufzeichnung von Gesprächen
• EDÖB, technische Mittel zur Überwachung am Arbeitsplatz
• ArGV 3 Art. 26 (SR 822.113), Fedlex
• 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.