Is it legal to record a meeting in the UK?

Investigatory Powers Act 2016 s.3(1) makes it an offence to intentionally intercept a communication "in the course of its transmission" by means of a public or private telecommunication system, without lawful authority, carrying up to two years on indictment. A participant recording the audio their own microphone hears and their own speakers play is not intercepting a transmission at all, so they are outside s.3. That is a scope argument on the statutory text rather than a cited holding, and we would present it as such.

The folklore correction. The common claim that the UK is a "one-party consent" country is not what the statute says. IPA 2016 s.44(1) authorises interception where the sender and the intended recipient have each consented. s.44(2) covers a single consenting party only where the surveillance has also been authorised under Part 2 of RIPA 2000 or its Scottish equivalent, which is not available to a private individual. So the reason a UK participant is safe is that they are outside s.3 for want of an intercepted transmission, not that s.44 blesses one-party consent. A page that says "one-party consent" is repeating an Americanism.

The practical difference is small for an individual and real for anyone reasoning by analogy from a US chart.

UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply on essentially the same analysis as the EU framework: 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 you have to tell people at the time the data are obtained. The European framework covers all of that once.

For a work meeting, legitimate interest is usually a better fit than consent, and the balancing test has to be documented and honest. Continuous capture cuts against necessity and against reasonable expectations, and that belongs in the assessment rather than out of it.

Two things, and they point in opposite directions.

On personal use: nothing we can cite, and we are flagging that rather than papering over it. The widely repeated line is that recording for your own personal use does not require you to tell the other party, whereas making the recording available to a third party engages data protection obligations. We could not find a live ICO page saying it. The URL that used to host the ICO's public-facing audio and video recording advice now returns 404, and the site search is not reachable. Do not attribute that position to the ICO, including on our authority. And note that "personal use" runs into the same household-exemption problem as everywhere else once the use is professional, which is the more important point and does not depend on the ICO at all.

On employers: the sharpest statement in this whole survey. The ICO's guidance on monitoring workers, in its section on video and audio surveillance, says verbatim: "Using audio recording, particularly where it is continuous, is considered more privacy intrusive than purely visual recording. You will therefore require a much greater justification if you use it. You should switch off by default any capability to record audio. You should only use it in exceptional circumstances, for example by a trigger switch. Continuous audio and video recording can be highly intrusive and you are unlikely to be able to justify it in most circumstances." It also lists a DPIA as a must for video or audio monitoring, and says covert monitoring is unlikely to be justifiable in usual circumstances.

That is directly adverse to an employer-deployed continuous transcriber, and sharper in tone than anything from CNIL, the Spanish or the Dutch authorities. The guidance carries its own banner noting it is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act.

There is no statutory works council with a veto. The Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations 2004 can require information and consultation in larger undertakings where triggered, but they are a much weaker instrument than Germany's BetrVG § 87 or the Dutch WOR Art. 27.

So the obstacle in the UK is not a procedural body, it is the regulator's substantive position, quoted above. An employer rolling out always-on audio capture across a team is doing the thing the ICO says it is unlikely to be able to justify. That is a materially different question from an individual recording their own meetings on their own laptop, and the two should not be answered together.

The short form is enough here, because the announcement is a transparency obligation rather than a criminal-law defence. It is still worth asking rather than telling.

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. Shout if you'd rather I didn't.

Say it before the substance, because Art. 13's UK equivalent asks for the information at the time the data are obtained, and an announcement at the end is not compliance. A line in the calendar invite adds advance notice and a record that notice was given. More on the mechanics, and on what to do when someone says no, is on telling people you're recording.

We have nothing sourced to offer here. Unlike Germany and France, where there is live case law readers ask about, we did not open UK authority on the admissibility of covertly made recordings in civil or employment proceedings, and we would rather say so than summarise something we have not read.

The UK is where the product's architecture does the most work, because the binding layer is data protection rather than criminal law, and data protection is the layer local processing actually speaks to. 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 presupposes receiving the data. That means no data processing agreement to sign, no sub-processor list, no international transfer and no transfer impact assessment, because there is no transfer. We have not found a 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 UK GDPR compliant, and could not: a tool cannot be compliant, only a processing operation can be lawful.

On the ICO's employer-side point, the honest reading is that continuous capture is the thing the guidance is unhappy about, and the fact that it runs locally does not answer an objection about intrusiveness. What Earkeep offers instead is that stopping is real and checkable: a pause from the live edge releases the microphone and the system audio stream, so the operating system's own recording indicator goes dark, a calendar meeting can be marked never-record, and a stretch of the day can be purged from the file with no server copy anywhere to reconcile against.

• Investigatory Powers Act 2016 s.3 and s.44, legislation.gov.uk.
• ICO, specific considerations for different methods of monitoring workers, and the monitoring workers hub.
• GDPR, whose structure UK GDPR follows.

• European recording laws: the four layers, 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 statutes and guidance rather than replacing them, and we are not lawyers. If the answer matters, ask someone who can be held to their answer.