Recording laws.

One-party versus all-party consent

Almost every article on this subject sorts places into two buckets and stops there. The buckets are real; the part they leave out is where people get caught.

"One-party consent" is shorthand for an exception inside an interception statute: the offence does not apply where a party to the communication consented. It is not a general permission to record. It usually says nothing about whether you may disclose the recording, and in some places it does not extend to face-to-face conversations at all.

"All-party consent" is shorthand for a stricter exception, and it is not one rule either:

• Massachusetts turns on whether the recording was made secretly, rather than on consent as such.
• Montana frames it as all parties knowing about the recording.
• Washington treats an announcement recorded as part of the conversation as a route to consent.
• Connecticut applies a stricter rule to private telephone calls in its civil statute than its criminal eavesdropping provision does.
• Oregon splits telephone and in-person conversations across different provisions with different requirements.

Every jurisdiction page here carries the conditions rather than a one-word label, because the conditions are the answer.

Participant versus non-participant recording

This distinction decides more than any other. Participant exceptions exist for people who are part of a conversation. Leaving a device running to capture other people is precisely what interception statutes prohibit, and no participant exception helps.

The checker treats a non-participant situation as its own high-caution path. It never applies participant-consent logic to it.

Phone calls versus in-person conversations

Several places treat these differently, and reading about one tells you nothing reliable about the other. Where a statute defines an "oral communication" by reference to an expectation of privacy, the setting is part of the test — which is why "it was in public" is not the shortcut people expect.

Reasonable expectation of privacy

A conversation can be private in a public place. Two people talking quietly in a café, a car or an office corridor can reasonably expect not to be recorded, and statutes that turn on privacy will look at exactly that. We do not classify any setting as automatically public.

Interstate and international calls

When participants are in different places, more than one rule may be relevant, and which one applies is a fact-specific determination that courts make case by case. We will not tell you the strictest rule automatically governs — that is a rule of thumb, not law.

Instead the checker shows the reviewed rule for every location involved, labels the situation multi-jurisdictional, and recommends express consent from everyone, which is the one approach that works whichever rule turns out to apply.

Recording is not sharing, and sharing is not publishing

Lawfully making a recording does not settle what you may do next. Federal law separately prohibits disclosing or using a communication you know was unlawfully intercepted; several jurisdictions restrict communication or publication in their own sections; and data-protection rules can apply to storage, retention and access.

Uploading audio to a third-party AI or transcription service is its own step, and often the most consequential one — another company receives everyone's voice under terms that decide retention and reuse.

Workplace and medical settings

Two places where policy routinely bites harder than statute. Employers restrict recording on their premises, on their systems and in their meetings, and breaching a policy is a disciplinary matter regardless of the law. Clinics and hospitals set their own rules, and health information attracts heightened protection almost everywhere.

Why these records carry a review date

Recording law changes: statutes are amended, courts decide cases, and regulators publish new guidance. A page that does not tell you when it was last checked is asking you to trust it indefinitely.

Every record here shows a last-checked date and a next-review date. When a record passes its review date, the checker downgrades its wording and displays a caution rather than continuing to present it as current. We do not scrape changed law and convert it into a rule automatically — automated checks confirm that source pages are still reachable; interpretation is reviewed by a person.

How BlackBox fits in

BlackBox records and transcribes on your device without automatically uploading conversations to BlackBox servers. That limits how far audio travels once it exists. It has nothing to do with whether you needed permission to create it — local processing does not remove consent, workplace, privacy or disclosure obligations, and this site will never suggest otherwise.