Recording consent, in plain terms

The short version

You are the one recording. Notepik is the tool, you are the operator. When our bot joins your call, the recording is yours, made at your instruction, and the legal responsibility for having permission to make it sits with you and your organisation.

In practice this is straightforward: tell people at the start of the call that it is being recorded and why, and give anyone who objects a way to say so. Almost every jurisdiction that regulates this is satisfied by exactly that.

What the bot does on your behalf

The recording bot is not hidden. When it joins a Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams call it appears in the participant list under a name you control, so everyone present can see that something is capturing the meeting. Most platforms additionally show their own recording indicator, and some announce it audibly.

We deliberately do not offer a silent or disguised recording mode. A product feature whose only purpose is to stop people noticing they are being recorded is a product feature for breaking the law.

Where one person agreeing is not enough

Consent law splits roughly into two camps. In one-party consent jurisdictions, it is lawful to record a conversation you are part of. In all-party consent jurisdictions, every participant has to agree.

In the United States, the following states require all parties to consent, and several treat a breach as a criminal matter rather than a civil one:

• California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland
• Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire
• Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington

On a call spanning several states, the safe assumption is that the strictest rule applies. If one participant is in California, treat the whole call as all-party.

Europe and the United Kingdom

Under the GDPR and the UK GDPR, a recording of an identifiable person is personal data and a transcript of what they said is more of it. You need a lawful basis to process it, you have to tell people you are doing so, and they retain rights over it including the right to ask for a copy or its deletion. Consent is one lawful basis; legitimate interests is another and is often the more workable one for internal business meetings, but it requires you to have actually weighed it.

Canada, Australia and elsewhere

Canada's PIPEDA and Australia's Privacy Act land in much the same place: tell people, have a reason, and honour requests about their data. Several Canadian provinces also require the consent of all parties to a recorded conversation. If you operate somewhere not named on this page, the safe default is to assume all-party consent applies and say so at the top of the call.

Meetings you should think twice about

Some conversations carry duties beyond consent, and a recording of them creates a record that may be discoverable, reportable, or simply damaging:

• Conversations covered by legal professional privilege
• Anything touching health information, particularly under HIPAA
• HR matters: grievances, disciplinary hearings, terminations
• Interviews with candidates, who have not agreed to anything yet
• Calls where a participant has said no

If somebody objects, the answer is to stop recording, not to record them anyway and delete it later. You can remove the bot mid-call at any time and the partial recording can be deleted from the meeting page.

What we do so you can keep your side of it

• The bot is visible in the participant list, always, under a name you set
• You can remove it from a call at any point
• Any meeting can be deleted, which removes the recording, transcript and summary
• Access is scoped to the workspace, so a recording is never visible outside it
• Every recording is encrypted at rest and reachable only through short-lived signed links, never a public URL

A suggested form of words

Said at the top of a call, this satisfies the notice requirement in most jurisdictions:

“Before we start: I am recording this call so we get accurate notes and action items, and the recording is shared with our team. Say now if you would rather I did not.”

For external calls, saying the same thing in the calendar invite gives people the chance to object before they are put on the spot.

This is guidance, not legal advice

We have written this to be genuinely useful rather than to protect ourselves, but it is a summary of a complicated area and we are not your lawyers. If you record meetings across borders, in a regulated industry, or with people outside your organisation, get advice that accounts for your circumstances.

Practical steps for recording a call, including where the bot appears and how to remove it mid-call, are in the guide.

Questions about how Notepik handles the data itself are answered in our privacy policy and security overview. Anything else, write to privacy@notepik.com.