Recording calls and the law

One-party and all-party consent

In the United States the rules are set state by state, and they fall into two broad camps:

• One-party consent — recording is allowed if one person on the call agrees, and that person can be you.
• All-party consent — everyone on the call has to agree.

Other countries differ again, sometimes substantially.

Calls that cross state lines

This is the part people miss. When a call spans two states with different rules, it can be subject to the stricter of the two. If you are in a one-party state and the person you are calling is not, do not assume your own state's rule governs the call.

The section on calls that cross state lines in our state-by-state guide goes into this in more detail, alongside how federal law sits underneath the state rules.

Working out what applies to you

Two locations matter on every call, and they can point to different rules:

• Where you are. Not where your business is registered, and not your area code — where you physically are when the call happens.
• Where the other person is. Which you may not know, particularly on a mobile number, and which can differ from the number's area code.

Look both up before you start recording, and check the position again if you move, if you start taking calls from a new region, or if you begin recording a type of call you were not recording before. The state-by-state table and the interstate rule are in our full guide.

What Epocra does about it

The recording announcement is on by default: when a call is answered, both parties hear that the call may be recorded. You can replace the wording with your own, or switch it off, under Settings › Announce recording. If you change or disable it, meeting the consent laws that apply to your calls becomes your responsibility. See What gets recorded.

Calls you should simply not record

Some conversations are better kept out of the system entirely rather than recorded with an announcement — medical, legal and personal calls are the usual examples. Rather than relying on remembering in the moment, exclude those people, or a whole contact type covering them, under Settings › Privacy. Excluded calls still appear in your history as Private, with no recording behind them.

See Excluding contacts.

Who can hear your recordings

You. Every account is encrypted with its own key, so one customer's data is not readable with another's. On top of that, account-level isolation is enforced by the database on every single query, on every read and write, rather than being a filter the application has to remember to apply.