Recording and consent
Recording a session in Pennsylvania.
Every party to a private Pennsylvania conversation has to agree before it is recorded, and the agreement has to come before the recording starts. That is 18 Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes chapter 57, 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 Pennsylvania the rule is all party.
The statute 18 Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes chapter 57
Pennsylvania's Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act makes it a felony to intercept an oral communication without the prior consent of all parties. Pennsylvania defines an oral communication by the speaker's justifiable expectation that it is not being intercepted, so the question on any given session is whether the client could reasonably think the conversation was private, and in a paid one to one session the answer is yes. The Superior Court has held that consent must be actual rather than implied from the surrounding circumstances.
Prior consent means the sentence comes first. Open the session with it rather than working it in once the client has settled, and if a second person joins, stop, ask, and start again. Pennsylvania is a felony jurisdiction and the exposure is the individual's.
03A client under 18
What changes when the person in the session is a child.
Ask the guardian of a client under 18 and hold the answer, because Pennsylvania requires actual consent rather than consent inferred from somebody having carried on talking. Where a parent sits in on part of a session and leaves, they were a party while they were there, and the recording captured them; that is worth mentioning when you ask rather than explaining afterwards.
04The data law
The recording is personal data under the Pennsylvania Breach of Personal Information Notification Act.
Pennsylvania has no comprehensive consumer privacy statute. Its breach act obliges notice to residents whose unencrypted personal information has been accessed, and a 2022 amendment extended it and set a timetable. The practical reading for a practice is that encryption is what turns a lost laptop from a notification event into an inconvenience, which is an argument for not keeping audio on a device at all.
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 Pa.C.S. chapter 57, Pennsylvania General Assembly
- Breach of Personal Information Notification Act, Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General
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 Washington
- Recording a session in Connecticut
- 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.