Recording and consent
Recording a session in India.
Indian law does not settle whether a participant may record a private conversation, and the constitutional right to privacy points towards asking everybody. That is the Information Technology Act 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, 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 India the rule is unsettled, treat as all party.
The statute the Information Technology Act 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023
India has no wiretap statute written for private individuals. Section 69 of the Information Technology Act governs interception by the state, and section 72 penalises disclosure of information obtained under the Act without consent. What changed the analysis is Puttaswamy, in which the Supreme Court held privacy to be a fundamental right, and courts have since been readier to exclude or criticise a recording made without the other person's knowledge. Treating India as needing everybody's agreement is the reading that survives.
Ask, and for anybody under 18 get the guardian's verifiable consent in writing before you start, because that one is statutory rather than advisory. The recording question and the children's question have different answers in India and the second is the stricter.
03A client under 18
What changes when the person in the session is a child.
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act treats anybody under 18 as a child and requires verifiable consent from a parent or lawful guardian before their personal data is processed at all. It also prohibits tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising directed at children. This is a hard rule rather than a professional preference, and a tutoring practice in India should collect that consent before the first session rather than before the first recording.
04The data law
The recording is personal data under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023.
The Act is built around consent given through a clear affirmative action, accompanied by an itemised notice in English or any of the languages in the Eighth Schedule, and it gives the person a right to withdraw consent as easily as it was given. Penalties are set in rupees at levels aimed at large processors, and the children's provisions carry the highest of them.
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.
- Information Technology Act 2000 as amended, India Code
- Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
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 the United Arab Emirates
- Recording a session in South Africa
- 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.