Recording meetings in the United States.

There is no single federal privacy statute and no single federal privacy regulator. Obligations come from sectoral federal law, a growing set of state privacy statutes, and Federal Trade Commission enforcement against unfair or deceptive practices. On recording specifically, the federal Wiretap Act at 18 U.S.C. § 2511 permits recording where one party to the communication has consented. That is the origin of one-party consent, and critically it sets a minimum that states are free to exceed.

Roughly a dozen states require every party to consent instead. The commonly cited ones include California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, and California Penal Code § 632 is the best-known example. Treat any such list, including this one, as a starting point: the details differ state to state, and legislation and case law move. For a call spanning several states the cautious approach is to apply the strictest rule in play rather than to determine which single state's law governs, because that is a genuinely contested question and getting it wrong is not a compliance issue but a criminal one.

The data protection instrument

No single federal data protection statute (Sectoral federal law plus state privacy statutes), e.g. California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA

Who supervises this

Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general (Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general)

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