Plain-language guide

Recording-call law, in plain English.

Call-recording rules vary by country and, inside most countries, by state or province. This page is a primer for the questions buyers ask before recording their first call. The very short version: you are responsible for complying with the rules that apply to your calls. aftercalls doesn't ask for consent on your behalf.

Canada

Federal law (Criminal Code, s. 184) generally allows recording a call as long as one person on the call consents. Separate privacy legislation can still apply on top.

• PIPEDA (federal, all of Canada in commercial contexts) generally requires organizations to disclose that a call is being recorded, explain the purpose, and handle the recording appropriately.
• Quebec Law 25 (Loi sur la protection des renseignements personnels dans le secteur privé) carries strong notice and purpose-limitation rules. Quebec calls should always begin with explicit notice.
• BC PIPA and Alberta PIPA mirror the disclosure model for organizations subject to provincial privacy legislation.
• Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador have their own privacy acts that can apply, particularly for health-sector recordings.

Best practice across Canada: tell every participant at the start of the call that you're recording, why, and how the recording will be used.

United States

Most U.S. states allow recording as long as at least one person on the call (you) knows about it. A handful of states require all participants to consent before recording. If anyone on the call is in one of those states, treat the whole call as all-party-consent.

All-party-consent states (record at your peril without notice)

California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington — plus a handful of others depending on context (Vermont, for instance, leans all-party in case law even though the statute is one-party). Treat anything ambiguous as all-party.

One-party-consent states

Most other U.S. states. You — as a participant on the call — are the consenting party, so you can record without separately asking.

If any participant is in an all-party state, treat the whole call as all-party. The strict-jurisdiction rule travels with whoever is on the line.

European Union and the United Kingdom

The EU's GDPR and the UK's Data Protection Act establish disclosure, purpose-limitation, retention, and data-subject-rights obligations on top of any country-level recording law. Some member states have additional national rules (Germany, France, and Spain are notably stricter). Best practice for EU and UK calls:

• Tell every participant at the start of the call
• State the purpose ("for our team's notes / for our quality assurance")
• Have a documented retention period and honour deletion requests
• Sign a Data Processing Agreement with us — we'll send one on request

Australia

Australian recording law is set at the state and territory level. Some states (Queensland, Victoria, the Northern Territory) follow a one-party model in private contexts; others (New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory) are stricter and effectively require all-party consent. The Privacy Act 1988 layers federal data-handling obligations on top. Default to disclosing.

Elsewhere

If you're unsure whether a specific call can lawfully be recorded — particularly if any participant is calling from a jurisdiction we haven't named — don't record it until you've checked with a qualified lawyer in every place the call touches.

What aftercalls gives you to make this easier

• Recording-notice chime — admins choose org-wide whether the agent plays an audible cue when a recording starts, leaves it to the user, or disables it entirely.
• Jurisdiction-aware prompts — when a call participant is calling from an all-party-consent jurisdiction we know about, the agent surfaces a reminder before recording starts.
• Consent receipts — when notice mode is on, the timestamp and what was played is recorded into the call's metadata so the audit trail shows what notice was given.
• Per-call disable — any user can decline to record a call, even if auto-detect offered to start one.

Our binding policies on call recording are in the Terms of Service (section 3) and Privacy Policy.