Of course, in some cases, when you call customer service, you may have heard a voice warning that the call may be recorded. Accordingly, It’s normal to wonder If it is possible to record conversations between individuals. For technical reasons yes. There are already more conditions from a legal perspective.

It is possible to record calls on Android phones, but ultimately it all depends on the legality of the country you are in. In the case of Spain, This is regulated in the criminal code In a section that refers to calls as well as other communications made via mobile phones.

Problematic records are ones you disagree with

As we said in the introduction, call recording is prohibited in Spanish law and more specifically in Article 197.1 of the Criminal Code. It is foreseen in the article. What we talked about in that section crimes Discovery and disclosure of secretssomething that this type of recording comes into play.

Of course, the typical thing Appropriating and/or disclosing the communications of others without permission. The paragraph literally says this:

“Whoever seizes the papers, letters, e-mail messages or other documents or personal belongings of another person without their consent, with the aim of revealing their secrets or violating their privacy, or interfering with your telecommunications or using technical devices to listen to, transmit, record or reproduce sound or image or any other communication signal“

This means interception of communications in which we are not actively participating. So we continue to record other people’s conversations through any application or special system. In such cases, the executioner is confronted. Imprisonment from 1 to 4 years and a fine from 12 months to 24 months. And that’s at best, because if those records are also “disseminated, disclosed or transferred to third parties” the penalties will increase from two to five years in prison.

Yes, in these facts, there is a certain permissibility of listening to the conversations of others without the need for consent, and it is this: Authorized by a judge to be used at trial as evidence of a possible crime. However, since it is not very common for a judge to grant this permission to a single person, this is a task that falls mostly to the police forces.

So the main point in this matter is that you need to ask permission from both parties and get their full consent. If you do not have this, it will be illegal to intercept the call even if the reason for it is legal as evidence in a lawsuit or similar.

You don’t even need permission to record calls you participate in

You may have noticed in the previous section that we talked about calls with which we disagree, regardless of how we listen to them. Okay then, If we join the callThings are changing a lot.

If you are a participant, you can record the conversation (Image: Hassan Ouajbir on Unsplash)

In these cases No crime is considered on record and the penalties described above have no value, because in this case the act itself does not constitute a crime, regardless of whether you reported it beforehand or not and regardless of how you recorded it.

The problem arises from the unauthorized dissemination of these records of the conversation participant(s). In this case, it is the same as the previous case, and as we mentioned before, it constitutes the crime of revealing secrets, which may require a prison sentence of two to five years. All

Summary: You can record the calls you participate in, but you cannot show them without permission.. Likewise, if we review what was explained in the previous article, recording conversations in which you are not an active party is in any case a crime unless permission is obtained from the parties.

Android doesn’t allow this natively and is already very strict against third-party apps.

Just a few months ago on Xataka Android we reviewed Google’s position on call recording in its mobile operating system. The idea that remains is They don’t want Android to use these features And so we saw how little by little they became more rigid.

Naturally, there was never a functionality that allowed or disallowed call recording, at least not in a simple way. However, there was a certain open bar for developers to publish their custom apps on Google Play. Of course, doing this always requires Android accessibility permissions.

A year and a half ago, in May 2022, Google got even more serious and launched a banning apps that use accessibility services to record calls. This meant that many well-known apps for this functionality left the Google store.

An example of an app that records calls and is still available on Google Play, but now focuses more on recording calls in WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype and other messaging apps

Of course, no matter how contradictory, We continue to find some apps that violate this rule. And we’re not just talking about apps that can be downloaded via APKs on the Internet, there are also examples of apps on the Google Play Store that are not only advertised for the purpose of recording searches, but also function that way when downloaded. . .

Therefore, according to previous comments on legality, You can use these applications to record the calls you participate in. but you must not use them for subsequent disclosure to the public or any third party. In principle, Google does not have the authority to block third-party APKs, no matter how much it tries to block these applications. And this means that if you download them from outside, because you resort to those from Google Play, the problem is that it is not you to download them, but Google continues to allow them (though maybe one day they will disappear and remain without updated support through Google Play).

via | Dexia Lawyers

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