Recording and consent
Recording a session in South Africa.
A person who is party to a South African conversation may record it, and the Protection of Personal Information Act governs what happens to the recording. That is the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act 2002, 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 South Africa the rule is one party.
The statute the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act 2002
Section 4 of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act permits a person to intercept a communication where they are a party to it. So a practitioner recording their own session is inside the Act. The obligation that remains is POPIA's, and it is not a light one: the Act requires processing to be lawful, minimal, and for a specific purpose made known to the person, with the Information Regulator empowered to issue enforcement notices.
You may record, and for a client under 18 you may not process the information at all without a competent person's prior consent. Those are two different rules and the second is the one that will catch a tutoring practice.
03A client under 18
What changes when the person in the session is a child.
POPIA is unusually strict about children: section 34 prohibits the processing of the personal information of a child altogether unless one of the grounds in section 35 applies, and the first of those is the prior consent of a competent person, which means the parent or guardian. This is a statutory prohibition rather than guidance, so a South African practitioner working with anybody under 18 needs that consent on file before the first session.
04The data law
The recording is personal data under the Protection of Personal Information Act 2013.
POPIA applies to any responsible party processing personal information in South Africa, with no turnover threshold, and it requires the appointment of an information officer who is registered with the Regulator. Its eight conditions for lawful processing include a security safeguards condition that obliges reasonable technical and organisational measures, and the Regulator has issued enforcement notices for failures of exactly that kind.
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.
- Regulation of Interception of Communications Act 2002, South African Government
- Protection of Personal Information Act, Information Regulator South Africa
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 Germany
- Recording a session in France
- 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.