The law on recording meetings, without the hand-waving.
Most articles on this subject answer the wrong question. They ask whether recording is legal, as though there were one answer per country. The useful question is narrower: who is in the room, what the recording is for, and who sees it afterwards.
What the law is actually about
Recording a meeting is not primarily a recording question, it is a personal data question. The moment a recording captures identifiable people, most of the jurisdictions on this page treat it as processing personal data, which brings obligations that exist whether or not anyone objected at the time. Criminal provisions on unauthorised recording then sit alongside that, addressing a narrower and more serious set of conduct. The two bodies of law answer different questions, and satisfying one says nothing about the other. The United States is the main exception to that shape: there is no general federal data protection statute, and the recording question is answered mostly by wiretap law, state by state.
The four questions that decide it
Who is in the room. A conversation among colleagues who all know they are being recorded is a different question from one where someone does not, and different again from a call with people outside your organisation.
Where they are. Jurisdiction follows the participants, not your servers. A call with people in three countries can engage three sets of rules at once.
What the recording is for. A purpose you can state plainly, before you start, is the foundation of every other obligation. A purpose invented afterwards is the origin of most problems.
Who sees it afterwards. Sharing, publishing, or feeding a recording into something nobody was told about is a separate act from making it, and it is where otherwise careful teams come unstuck.
What to do in practice
The practice below is not the legal minimum in every jurisdiction. It is the practice that is defensible in all of them, which is a more useful target when your calls cross borders.
- Say it out loud at the start, before anything substantive is discussed, and say what the recording is for. Not a line in the invite nobody read.
- Give people a real way to decline. An announcement that leaves no room to object is closer to a notification than to consent.
- Write it down. A line in the notes recording that the meeting was recorded, and that nobody objected, is worth more later than anyone's memory of the moment.
- Keep external meetings to a higher standard than internal ones. Colleagues share an employment context; a customer, a candidate, or a supplier does not.
- Decide how long you keep recordings, and actually delete them. Indefinite retention converts a small, well-handled recording into a growing liability.
- Treat sharing as a fresh decision. The question is not whether you were allowed to record, it is whether this particular person was meant to hear it.
Meeting bots and remote calls
A bot that joins a call is a visible participant. It appears in the attendee list, and on Microsoft Teams it is labelled as an external and unverified participant that the organiser has to admit from the lobby. That visibility is a feature rather than an obstacle: an announced participant with a name in the list is the opposite of a covert recording, and the admission step is a deliberate act by whoever runs the meeting. It does not, on its own, discharge the obligation to tell people what the recording is for.
By country
Country pages cover the specific instruments, the regulator, and what changes locally. Start with the framework below, because most of what matters is common to all of them.
European Union and EEA
Europe, outside the EU
These are the jurisdictions people actually search for, not every country in the world. A page here is a page somebody has to re-verify, so the list is deliberately finite. If the country you need is missing, the framework above still applies and a local lawyer can tell you where it differs.
Recording that announces itself.
Canto's notetaker joins as a named participant the organiser admits, and the recording, the transcript and who can see it stay under your control. 300 minutes a month, free forever.