Recording and consent
Recording a session in the other 36 US states.
In the remaining 36 states one party to the conversation may record it, and if you are in the session that party is you. That is 18 United States Code section 2511, 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 the other 36 US states the rule is one party.
The statute 18 United States Code section 2511
The federal wiretap act sets the floor. Section 2511 makes interception an offence and then excepts a person who is a party to the communication, or who has the prior consent of a party, provided the recording is not made to commit a crime or a tort. Thirty six states have adopted that rule for their own purposes, so a practitioner recording their own session in those states is inside both the federal act and the state one. A state may always be stricter than the floor, and the fourteen states with their own pages here are.
One party is the legal floor, not the professional standard. The reason to ask in a one party state is that a client who finds out afterwards will not care which column their state is in, and a practitioner who asked has a better answer than one who did not have to.
03A client under 18
What changes when the person in the session is a child.
Being allowed to record is not the same as being allowed to record a child without telling anybody. Where a client is under 18, ask the parent or guardian wherever you are, because the argument you will actually have is with a parent rather than with a prosecutor, and because several of the one party states have education or child protection rules that apply to somebody working with a student.
04The data law
The recording is personal data under the Federal Trade Commission Act section 5, and the state breach notification laws.
There is no general federal privacy statute covering a practitioner. Section 5 of the FTC Act reaches unfair or deceptive practices, which is the hook regulators use when a company does something with data that its own notice said it would not. Every state has a breach notification law, and all of them would treat a named client's recording as the kind of record whose loss has to be notified.
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.
- 18 U.S. Code section 2511, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
- Security breach notification laws, National Conference of State Legislatures
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 Kingdom
- Recording a session in Ireland
- 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.