Consent and jurisdictions

Consent law for recording conversations varies by state and by country. Some places let you record a call if you are a participant. Others require every person on the call to agree. IntelliPrompter helps you stay on the right side of the line, but the responsibility is yours.

You can record a conversation if you are a participant in it. The other side does not have to agree. You do not have to tell them.

• Most US states follow this rule.
• Most of Canada follows this rule under the federal Criminal Code.
• Being a participant means you are on the call. Recording a call you are not on is a different thing and is not covered here.

Everyone on the call must consent to the recording. If one person has not agreed, you cannot record.

• A subset of US states follow this rule (listed below).
• Most of the EU falls here, usually via GDPR plus a member-state recording statute.
• Consent can be verbal at the start of the call. It does not have to be written. But it does have to be on-record.

These are the US states the app treats as all-party. If your account jurisdiction is set to one of them, the pre-meeting gate kicks in (see below).

• California
• Florida
• Illinois
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• Montana
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• Pennsylvania
• Washington

Go to intelliprompter.com/account#privacy and pick your jurisdiction from the dropdown. The setting propagates to the desktop app within 24 hours, or immediately on next sign-in.

Pick where you actually sit when you take calls. Not where your company is incorporated. Not where the counterparty is. If you take calls from more than one state, pick the stricter one.

Single-party state. You can start a meeting in any mode. The default is Full. No extra prompt.

Two-party state. The pre-meeting screen shows a consent gate. You have two choices:

• Check the box confirming you have consent from everyone on the call. The meeting starts in whatever mode you picked.
• Leave the box unchecked. The app defaults you to Self-only mode, so the counterparty's audio is never captured.

When you are not sure, pick Self-only. Only your microphone is processed. The counterparty is never captured or transcribed. The coaching still works, focused on how you are showing up. See Privacy Modes for the full comparison.

If you work with counterparties in the EU, assume all-party consent. GDPR plus member-state recording law tends to land there, and the penalties for getting it wrong are higher than in the US. Two options:

• Default to Self-only for EU calls. The counterparty is never captured, so the recording question does not apply to them.
• Or ask for explicit consent on-record at the start of the call, in a mode that captures their audio.

If you are the counterparty's data controller for some other reason (an employment relationship, a vendor contract), the analysis gets more complicated. Ask a lawyer.

Short, honest, factual. People say yes when you tell them what is actually happening. Try:

“Hey, I use a note-taking tool that transcribes our conversation locally on my laptop. OK if I keep it running? You can see the summary after if you want.”

Three things that make this work: you named the tool category (note-taking, not surveillance), you flagged the local-first part (not a cloud recorder), and you offered to share the output. If they say no, end the sentence with “no problem” and start the meeting in Self-only.

The person on the other end of your call does not have an IntelliPrompter account. Their audio, when captured, is handled under our standard retention policy: transcribed locally on your device, stored in your local database, and used for your coaching and your post-meeting review. We do not sell it. We do not train on it. We do not share it with third parties.

For the full data-handling story, see our privacy policy. If a counterparty asks you to delete their audio from a specific meeting, you can delete the meeting from the meetings list in the desktop app. The underlying transcript rows go with it. On Full mode a DELETE runs against the local database. On Ephemeral there is nothing to delete, because nothing was written in the first place.

• Privacy Modes. The three modes, side by side, with when to use each.
• Getting Started. Install, sign in, run your first meeting.