Recording and consent
Last updated: 19 September 2026
Caliptic Translate can transcribe a meeting entirely on your own computer. Whether you are allowed to make that recording is a separate question, and it is not answered by where the data is processed. It is answered by the law where you and the other participants are.
The one distinction that matters
Most legal systems sort recording rules into two families:
A second question sits on top of it: even where recording is lawful, sharing the recording, or using it at work, may need a separate legal basis — a works council agreement, an employment-law consultation, or a data-protection notice.
Rough map
High level only. Rules differ by state or province, by whether the conversation is private, and by what you do next with the file.
| Place | Family | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Germany | All-party | § 201 StGB — recording the non-public spoken word of another without consent is a criminal offence, even for a participant. Treat consent as mandatory. |
| France | All-party | Art. 226-1 Code pénal protects words spoken in private. Recording without the speaker's consent exposes you to criminal liability. |
| Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Netherlands, Nordics | Mixed | Several of these protect the confidentiality of the spoken word in their criminal codes. «Her ülke için ayrı ayrı doğrulanacak.» |
| United Kingdom | One-party (personal use) | A participant may record for personal use. Business use, sharing or publishing brings UK GDPR and other duties into play. |
| United States — federal | One-party | 18 U.S.C. § 2511 permits recording by a party to the call. |
| United States — several states | All-party | California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington and others require all parties to consent. On a call that crosses state lines, assume the stricter rule applies. |
| Canada | One-party | s. 184 Criminal Code permits recording by a participant. PIPEDA still applies to commercial handling of the recording. |
| Türkiye | One-party, narrowly | TCK md. 133 criminalises listening to or recording conversations between others. A participant recording their own conversation is treated differently, but what you then do with it matters. See KVKK. |
| Japan | One-party | A participant may generally record. Separate duties arise under APPI once you handle the recording as a business. |
| South Korea | One-party, strictly enforced | The Protection of Communications Secrets Act makes recording a conversation you are not a party to a criminal offence. A participant may record. See PIPA. |
| Australia | Varies by state | Listening-devices and surveillance-devices acts differ per state. «Eyalet bazında doğrulanacak.» |
| Gulf states | Strict | Recording or sharing a private conversation without consent carries criminal penalties in several Gulf jurisdictions. See PDPL. |
A rule that is safe everywhere
Tell people before you start, and get a clear yes. It satisfies the all-party jurisdictions, it satisfies the one-party ones, and in a workplace it is usually what the data-protection notice needs anyway. Caliptic Translate shows a notice before your first meeting recording and keeps a red recording indicator on screen for the whole session, but it cannot know who is in the room — only you can.
What Caliptic Translate actually does
Speech recognition, translation, speaker separation and meeting transcription run entirely on your own computer. Audio, transcripts and meeting titles are never transmitted to us or to any third party. In Meeting mode the raw audio is not stored at all — only the transcribed text is written to your own disk, under your own user account.
Because of this, for the content of your conversations we are not a controller or a processor: we never receive that data. The person who starts the recording is the one who decides why and how it is processed, and is therefore the controller of it.
We do hold a small amount of data as the seller: order and subscription metadata through Paddle, our Merchant of Record. That is covered by our Privacy Policy.
If you record meetings at work
- Check whether your employer already has a policy. Many do, and it overrides your own judgement.
- In the EU, expect a works-council or employee-representative angle, not just a GDPR one.
- Say in the invitation, not only at the start, that the meeting will be transcribed.
- Decide in advance how long you keep transcripts and who can read them.
- If the conversation touches health, union membership, religion, or similar, the bar is higher — those are special categories under GDPR and equivalents.