Recording Law :: Modem Spy

Legality of recording conversations in UK

What is ethical?

At Retell we feel that there is a clear distinction about what is ethical when recording calls as well as is recording conversations legal.

In the normal business situation you record your own calls for use in training, customer service or to resolve issues with customers and in these cases you know what was said because either you or one of your employees was a party to the call in the first place. The call will only be used within the company or perhaps with the customer. It does not seem to us that there is any ethical difference between having a telephone conversation and telling a colleague about it or having a telephone conversation and letting a colleague listen to a recording of it. We believe that there is a parallel between receiving a letter and telling a colleague about it, or letting them read the letter. The only difference between the colleague reading the letter or listening to the recording or being told about them is that by reading or listening to the original they know word for word what was said.

What is not ethical would be for someone else, for example a competitor, to bug your offices or telephone lines and so to learn your commercial secrets. Note that in this case the competitor was not one of the parties to the original telephone call, nor would they notify you that the call was being recorded.

UK law rightly makes such third party interception where neither party to the call knows that the call is being recorded illegal except by the Police for law enforcement, which is outside the scope of this page.
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See also:
Table of contents.
Recording Law in United States
Canadian Recording Law