Recording meetings in Austria.

The General Data Protection Regulation applies here of its own force rather than through a national translation of it, and the national act below handles the parts member states are left to decide for themselves. The supervisory authority enforces both. In Austria that is the Datenschutzgesetz. Alongside it, Section 120 of the Strafgesetzbuch addresses the misuse of sound recording or listening devices to record or listen to a statement by another person that was not intended to come to that person's knowledge.

The temptation with Austria is to reason from German practice on Section 201 StGB, and it is a mistake: the provisions are similar in concept but they are different statutes interpreted by different courts. The second thing Austria adds is the works council. Where recording affects employees, Austrian labour law can require consultation or agreement with employee representatives, which is an employment obligation running alongside the data protection one rather than inside it.

The data protection instrument

Datenschutzgesetz (Data Protection Act), DSG, as amended 2018

Who supervises this

Österreichische Datenschutzbehörde (Austrian Data Protection Authority)

Criminal provisions

These sit alongside data protection law rather than replacing it. They generally address conduct that is covert or that involves conversations the recorder was not part of, which is a narrower category than everyday meeting recording, and a considerably more serious one.

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.

Questions