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Call Recording Consent

Recording a phone call without proper notification is a criminal offence in most jurisdictions where Orbit operates. This page is the canonical reference for which jurisdictions require one-party, all-party, or explicit-consent recording, and how Orbit’s voice platform helps you comply.
This page describes Orbit’s platform controls. It is not legal advice. Recording law varies by call destination, caller location, call purpose, and industry (healthcare, finance, and debt collection carry sector-specific overlays). Confirm your obligations with qualified counsel before launching a recording program.
Every voice number on Orbit carries a per-organization recording-consent policy configured under Voice → Calls → Recording settings. The policy is a two-axis model and is persisted in org settings under settings.recording.{eligibility_mode, consent_announcement_mode}. The two axes are orthogonal: eligibility decides which calls are captured, while the announcement mode decides how participants are notified.

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Axis 1 — eligibility_mode (which calls auto-record)

Selecting any eligibility_mode other than manual while consent_announcement_mode is none surfaces an in-app warning, because auto-recording without an announcement may violate two-party-consent laws. Pair an auto-record eligibility with an announcement mode unless you have a documented external consent process.
The announcement itself can be either a TTS string (read out by Cartesia or ElevenLabs in the org’s default voice) or a URL to a .wav / .mp3 file in GCS or any reachable HTTPS endpoint. By default this announcement plays once, before the call connects to the human or agent leg. Two later events — pausing and resuming a recording, and joining a recorded conference — add a further mid-call disclosure on top of that pre-connect announcement. See Mid-call disclosures below.
Recording is captured at the org level through Orbit’s media-egress pipeline (orbit-media-egress). The pre-connect announcement plays before the call connects and before recording starts, so if the caller hangs up during the announcement, no recording is captured and no per-minute recording cost is billed. Pausing and resuming a recording, or admitting a participant into a recorded conference, can trigger an additional disclosure during the call — see Mid-call disclosures.

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Mid-call disclosures

The pre-connect announcement is the default, single notification. Two events add a second consent touch-point during a live call, both governed by the same org recording-consent policy. Pause and resume. When you pause a recording and later resume it with POST /voice/calls/{id}/recording/pause and POST /voice/calls/{id}/recording/resume (see Operator obligations), Orbit plays a short spoken notice to the parties announcing that recording was paused or resumed. This disclosure plays only when consent enforcement is on and the call falls under an all-party-consent posture; one-party calls that already heard the start-of-call notice are not interrupted again. The pause and resume text can be overridden per org and is localized to the org’s primary language. Joining a recorded conference. When a participant joins — or is transferred — into a conference that records with per-participant consent, that participant hears their own consent prompt as they enter and presses a key to grant or decline. The prompt is played to the joining party only, not to the whole room, and that participant’s audio is held out of the recording until they respond — so a leg is never mixed in without a recorded consent decision. If the room’s consent posture cannot be determined, Orbit prompts anyway and holds the leg, rather than including a participant by omission.

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Jurisdiction matrix

The matrix below summarises the prevailing rule per region. Where a country has subnational variation (US, Canada, Australia), the strictest in-scope state’s rule applies if you route to that jurisdiction. The Orbit announcement mode column refers to the consent_announcement_mode axis; choose your eligibility_mode separately based on which calls you intend to capture.
When in doubt, set the policy to announce_all. The announcement is brief (typical 5–8 seconds for “This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes”), customer-service trained, and legally defensible across every jurisdiction Orbit supports.

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Per-region detail

Federal wiretap law (18 U.S.C. § 2511) permits recording when at least one party to the call consents — and the recording party counts as that one party. Fourteen states layer an all-party-consent requirement on top: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington. The applicable rule is determined by where the parties are physically located at the time of the call, not the location of the carrier or the dashboard operator. If any party is in an all-party state, that state’s rule governs.Industry overlays: HIPAA (treat call audio as PHI when it discusses health), PCI DSS (do not record DTMF tones that capture card numbers — use Orbit’s PCI mask feature), FDCPA / TCPA (debt collection and telemarketing have additional notice requirements beyond recording consent).
Under GDPR Art 6, recording requires a documented lawful basis (consent, contract performance, legitimate interest, legal obligation, etc.). ePrivacy Directive Art 5(1) layers on a confidentiality-of-communications requirement that, in most member-state implementations, is read as requiring explicit notification before recording starts. The UK applies the equivalent regime via UK GDPR, PECR, and RIPA.The pragmatic posture: play the announcement to every party (announce_all), keep a record of the legal basis (consent, legitimate_interest, etc.) in your CRM, and ensure the customer can request access or deletion of recordings via your GDPR data-subject-rights process. Orbit’s retention policy (configurable per channel under Settings → Compliance → Retention) lets you auto-delete recordings after a fixed window.
PIPEDA (federal, applies to commercial activity) treats recording as a collection of personal information and requires knowledge and consent at the time of collection. For quality-assurance recording with a clear, prominent notice at the start of the call, regulators have accepted implied consent. For marketing or sales-evaluation recording, explicit consent is the safer posture. Quebec’s Law 25 (in force since 2023) is stricter than PIPEDA and is best treated as an explicit-consent regime.
Recording is governed by state Surveillance Devices Acts, not federal law. ACT, QLD, SA, and WA are one-party-consent jurisdictions. NSW, VIC, TAS, and NT require all-party consent. The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (Cth) also prohibits intercepting a call in transit without a warrant, but does not generally restrict consensual recording by a party to the call.
UAE, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Turkey, and India all treat unauthorised recording as a criminal offence under their respective penal or telecommunications codes. Brazil’s LGPD, Argentina’s Personal Data Protection Act, and Chile’s Law 19.628 all require an explicit lawful basis plus notice. For every region not separately listed above, treat the default as announce_all plus documented consent capture, and confirm with local counsel before routing production traffic.

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Operator obligations

Orbit gives you the controls; the obligations remain yours.

Choose the strictest applicable rule

If your call may traverse a jurisdiction with all-party-consent, configure announce_all for the entire org — not just for numbers serving that region. Cross-jurisdictional liability is determined by the strictest state on the call.

Document your lawful basis

For GDPR / LGPD / PIPEDA destinations, keep a record per contact of which lawful basis applies and how it was captured. Orbit’s contact custom fields can store this; export them quarterly to your compliance system.

Honour deletion requests

GDPR Art 17, CCPA, and Quebec Law 25 give data subjects the right to request deletion of their recordings. Orbit exposes a per-contact delete endpoint and a retention-policy scheduler. Build the request flow into your support process.

Mask sensitive audio

Pause recording before capturing card numbers, full SSNs, or health-screening responses, then resume onto the same recording file. Orbit exposes POST /voice/calls/{id}/recording/pause and POST /voice/calls/{id}/recording/resume for PCI- and HIPAA-scope flows; each paused window is stamped onto the call’s audit timeline (call.recording.paused / call.recording.resumed) so a reviewer can prove exactly which seconds were excluded from the stored media.

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Where to configure

  • Per-org default: Voice → Calls → Recording settings. This picks the eligibility mode (eligibility_mode), the announcement mode (consent_announcement_mode), and the TTS / audio URL. It is the policy that governs every call unless a narrower control below overrides it.
  • Per-inbound-route override: Numbers → <select number> → Inbound routing → Advanced behavior → Recording mode (off / all / inbound / outbound). A route left on its default inherits the org eligibility mode; an explicit value wins for calls that hit that route — useful when one DID serves a stricter jurisdiction than the org default.
  • Per-agent: Agents → <agent> → Voice → Safety & Limits → Disable call recording. When enabled, that agent never starts a recording egress even if recording is enabled org-wide — use it for unrecorded agent personas (e.g. PCI-scope payment flows).
Changes take effect on the next call. Historical recordings retain the consent policy that was active at the time they were captured; the audit log records both the policy and the announcement payload for every recorded call.