Recording meetings in Portugal.

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 Portugal that is Lei n.º 58/2019. Alongside it, Article 199 of the Código Penal addresses unlawful recordings: recording words spoken by another person and not intended for the public, without that person's consent, and separately using or allowing others to use such a recording.

Article 199 is drafted around consent rather than around whether you were a participant, which makes Portugal stricter in practice than the jurisdictions whose provisions target only non-participants. Being in the room is not, by itself, the answer. The provision also treats using or passing on a recording as conduct separate from making it, so a recording properly made can still raise a question when it is shared. On top of that sit the ordinary data protection obligations: a stated purpose, a lawful basis, transparency at the time, bounded retention.

The data protection instrument

Lei de Execução do RGPD (GDPR Implementation Act), Lei n.º 58/2019

Who supervises this

Comissão Nacional de Protecção de Dados (National Data Protection Commission)

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