Is it legal to record a meeting?

Recording a meeting you’re part of is legal in most places if you have the required consent — the catch is that “required consent” means different things in different regions. Get that part right and you’re fine; ignore it and you’re exposed regardless of how good your intentions were. (This is general information, not legal advice — when in doubt, check the rules for your jurisdiction or ask your legal team.)

The core rule: one-party vs all-party consent

The legal question almost always comes down to how many people have to agree:

• One-party consent. A recording is lawful as long as one participant — which can be you — consents. This is the default in much of the U.S. and many other countries.
• All-party consent (commonly called “two-party”). Everyone on the call must agree before you record. About a dozen U.S. states fall here, including California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Washington.

Because remote calls routinely cross state and national lines, the people on your call may be governed by different rules at once. When that happens, the safe move is to follow the strictest applicable rule — treat it as all-party consent.

Outside the U.S., frameworks like the EU’s GDPR treat recorded meeting audio as personal data, which means participants should be informed and have a legitimate basis for the processing. Again: the practical takeaway is disclosure.

The simple rule that works everywhere: tell people

You don’t need to memorize a 50-state matrix to stay safe. Disclosing that you’re capturing the meeting satisfies the consent requirement in essentially every regime — one-party, all-party, and GDPR alike — and it’s also just the respectful thing to do. A one-line heads-up at the start of the call, or a note in the calendar invite, is enough. See how to tell participants you’re using an AI notetaker for the wording.

This is why we frame Canary around transparency, never secrecy. The goal is never to capture a meeting people don’t know about — it’s to be informed during the call without disrupting it.

Recording vs. real-time notes: not the same thing

It helps to separate two things people lump together:

1. Keeping a stored recording of the meeting to review later.
2. Getting live awareness of what’s being said right now.

You can have the second without the first. Canary is a real-time, bot-free meeting summarizer: it captures your computer’s system audio locally — no bot joins the call, no plugin, no virtual audio device — and shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary so you can catch up the instant your name is called. Because nothing dials into the meeting as a visible participant, the call stays normal; and because you can get the awareness you need without archiving a recording, you reduce what you’re storing in the first place. You should still disclose that you’re capturing notes — “no bot” is not the same as “no one knows.”

If you’re weighing tools, the consent and disclosure considerations apply to bot-based notetakers too — see how Canary compares to Otter and Granola, both of which produce their summaries after the meeting rather than during it. And if your real worry is simply catching up after you’ve tabbed away, a live summary solves that without any recording at all.

Bottom line

Recording a meeting is usually legal with consent, and the consent bar ranges from “one person agrees” to “everyone agrees” depending on where participants are. Rather than gamble on which rule applies, tell people you’re capturing the meeting — it keeps you compliant everywhere and builds trust. Better still, if all you need is in-the-moment context, a real-time summary gives you that without a stored recording at all.