Recording meetings in Switzerland.

Switzerland is in neither the EU nor the EEA. It has its own Federal Act on Data Protection, substantially revised and in force since September 2023, which moved Swiss law closer to the Regulation. Alongside it, Article 179bis of the Criminal Code addresses listening to or recording a conversation between other people without their consent, and Article 179ter addresses a participant recording a non-public conversation without the other participants' consent.

Article 179ter is the one to understand. Most European criminal provisions in this area are aimed at somebody eavesdropping on a conversation they are not part of, which leaves the participant case to data protection law. Switzerland legislates the participant case directly, which makes it clearer and stricter at the same time: being in the meeting is expressly not the answer. Switzerland also holds an EU adequacy decision, and the GDPR can still reach a Swiss organisation extraterritorially where it offers services to people in the EU, so the two regimes often apply together.

The data protection instrument

Bundesgesetz über den Datenschutz (Federal Act on Data Protection), revised FADP, in force since 1 September 2023

Who supervises this

Eidgenössischer Datenschutz- und Öffentlichkeitsbeauftragter (Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner)

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