Recording and consent
Recording a session in Germany.
Recording the spoken word of a private conversation in Germany without the agreement of the people in it is a criminal offence under section 201. That is Strafgesetzbuch section 201, the confidentiality of the spoken word, and the sentence a practitioner says out loud before recording is the same one in every country on this site.
This is a plain summary, not legal advice. Laws change. If the answer matters to your business, check with a lawyer in your own country.
01The sentence
Say this, out loud, before anything else is said.
I am going to record this session so I can write you a proper report afterwards. Is that all right with you?
It is the same sentence everywhere, because a specific disclosure followed by a direct question is what recording guidance favours over a vague notice, and because everybody in the session agreeing is safe in every jurisdiction on this site. What changes by place is who has to answer it.
02Who has to agree
In Germany the rule is all party.
The statute Strafgesetzbuch section 201, the confidentiality of the spoken word
Section 201 of the criminal code protects the confidentiality of the spoken word, and it is one of the oldest and best enforced privacy offences in Europe. It makes it punishable to record the non publicly spoken word of another person on a sound carrier without authorisation, and it reaches a participant: being in the conversation is not authorisation to record it. A German court will also generally refuse to admit a recording made in breach, and the Federal Labour Court has upheld dismissals for making one.
Ask, get it in writing, and do not record the moment before the answer. Germany is the European jurisdiction where a recording made without agreement is most likely to be both a criminal matter and useless as evidence of anything.
03A client under 18
What changes when the person in the session is a child.
For a client under 18, German practice is to obtain the written agreement of the guardians, and for older teenagers to obtain both theirs and the young person's, because section 201 protects the person whose word was recorded rather than the person who pays. Where both parents hold custody, both are usually asked. A German tutoring practice should treat this as a form at enrolment rather than a question at the first session.
04The data law
The recording is personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation and the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz.
Germany layers a federal data protection act and sixteen state acts on top of the GDPR, and its supervisory authorities are the most numerous and among the most active in Europe. The practical consequence for a small practice is that the appointment threshold for a data protection officer is lower than the European default: an organisation where twenty or more people are constantly engaged in automated processing has to name one.
05What Slide Practice does
The audio goes as soon as the report is written.
At upload the practitioner confirms on screen that everyone in the session agreed. That confirmation is stored, and the footer of the report prints the date it was given.
Session audio is deleted as soon as the write-up is made. The The text of what was said, written out from the recording. stays with the The written page a client receives after a session: what was covered, what went well, what they agreed to do, and what is next., on the client's own page, and both are kept until the account is closed. Closing an account starts a 30 day window, at the end of which everything is deleted rather than archived.
Nothing is drafted from a recording until the practitioner has confirmed that everyone agreed, and nothing reaches a client until a person has read it. The whole of what is kept, and for how long, is on the security page and in the privacy policy.
06Where this came from
Two primary sources, and neither of them is us.
This is a plain summary, not legal advice. Laws change. If the answer matters to your business, check with a lawyer in your own country.
Nearby
- Recording a session in France
- Recording a session in Spain
- Every jurisdiction, and how permission works in the product
- What the report itself looks like, practice by practice
Bring one recording you already have permission for, and read what comes back. No account and no card.