Recording and consent
Recording a session in Ireland.
A participant in an Irish session may record it, and the obligations that matter come from the General Data Protection Regulation rather than from interception law. That is the Interception Act 1993 and the Data Protection Act 2018, 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 Ireland the rule is one party, with a data law on top.
The statute the Interception Act 1993 and the Data Protection Act 2018
The Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages Act is directed at interception by somebody outside the communication, and a practitioner recording their own session is not that. What the Irish Data Protection Commission has been firm about is the quality of the consent: an organisation relying on consent has to be able to show what the person was told, when, and how they could have said no without losing the service. The Commission has taken enforcement action over recordings kept without a stated purpose.
Say the sentence, keep the answer, and write down the retention period somewhere a client can read it. Irish practice, and Irish enforcement, both reward an organisation that can show its working rather than one that can quote a clause.
03A client under 18
What changes when the person in the session is a child.
Ireland sets the digital age of consent at 16, which is higher than Britain and matters for anybody offering an online service to a teenager. For a paid session with a client under 18, ask the parent or guardian, hold the answer, and give the young person their own explanation. The Commission's Fundamentals for a Child-Oriented Approach to Data Processing is the document to read before building a practice around under 18s.
04The data law
The recording is personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018.
The Irish regime is the GDPR with a domestic act around it, and the Data Protection Commission is one of the more active supervisory authorities in Europe. The obligations that bear on a recording are the ones about purpose limitation and storage limitation: hold the audio for the purpose you named and no longer, and be able to say what that purpose was without reaching for a lawyer.
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.
- Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages Act 1993, Irish Statute Book
- Know your obligations, Data Protection Commission
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 Canada
- Recording a session in Australia
- 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.