That’s a question that needs to be clarified with your legal team - however, the law around recording calls is mainly set by The Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000.

Recording and monitoring telephone calls or e-mails

In short, this states that you can only record a call under one of the following circumstances:

To provide evidence of a business transaction.
To ensure that a business complies with regulatory procedures.
To see that quality standards or targets are being met in the interests of national security.
To prevent or detect crime.
To investigate the unauthorised use of a telecom system.
To secure the effective operation of the telecom system.

Most importantly, this legislation also states that reasonable efforts need to be made for BOTH parties on a call to be aware that the call is being recorded or monitored.

In 2016, a set of new data laws called GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) were established, and this also affects the law around call recordings. What GDPR means, effectively, is just that your data is even MORE tightly controlled. We, for example:

Encrypt all data on our disks with AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption. This means that any data stored by us can only be decrypted by us, using a unique, protected and inaccessible key.
Support SRTP, which is a secure form of audio encryption. You can enable / disable this in your account, as most devices don’t enable this as standard.
Allow you to enable / disable call recordings on a user by user basis.
Provide a shortcode feature that lets you temporarily disable recordings - for example, if you’re discussing sensitive information over the phone, you can key in a shortcode that disables any recording.
Allow you to delete any and all recordings from your dashboard, by simply accessing them from your account.

It’s also vital that you have steps in place to codify exactly who has access to your call data, how it is stored, and how you are protected in case of any data theft.

It’s not possible to provide comprehensive legal details around the legislation of call recordings here - any person considering interception, recording or monitoring of telephone calls or e-mails is strongly advised to seek their own independent legal advice and should not seek to rely on the general information provided above. It should be borne in mind that criminal offences and civil actions may occur when the relevant legislation is not complied with. Accordingly, Oftel accepts no liability for reliance by any person on the above information.

If you need any further help today, please don't hesitate to contact our friendly support team on 0330 122 6000 or by email!