Are Companies Ignoring Call Recording Laws in California?

Call recording laws in California are otherwise known as ‘wiretapping laws’, ‘electronic eavesdropping laws’ and ‘two-party consent laws’. They are based on the 40-year historic California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA).

In the simplest terms, CIPA dictates that permission must be given by both parties involved in a conversation which is assumed to be private for it to be electronically recorded in any way. The conversation doesn’t have to be in a private location to be assumed to be private by one or both parties involved.

According to the Digital Media Law Project , the person being recorded in a public or semi-public location still may have the expectation that nobody is listening into the conversation. This can be a live conversation or telephone conversation, whether via cellular or traditional line. CIPA has application to both situations.

Many Businesses Already Know to be Wary of Call Recording Laws in California

If your business operates in California or not, it may still be held liable for violation of call recording laws in California. This is because the law can apply to inbound and outbound telephone calls and the likelihood that one of the parties to either type of call resides in California is great. It is one of the largest and most populated states in the U.S.

Call recording laws in California are also mirrored by similar laws in a handful of other states such as New Hampshire, Illinois, Delaware, Florida, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Nevada, Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland, and Montana.

What has set it apart, however, is how often ‘wiretapping law’ is cited and lawsuits are filed on behalf of plaintiffs located in California.  Interpretations of CIPA continue to incite a level of lawsuit activity in California that similar laws in other states don’t seem to do.

The reason remains unclear, but since Kight v. CashCall Inc. in 2011, lawyers are migrating to filing CIPA-based class action lawsuits based on California penal code 632.7 rather than just 632.

In this part of CIPA, the language suggests that the actual parties to the call are not held liable, but only intercepting third parties with recording abilities. This may or may not be a successful trend for plaintiffs. Since a large part of these class action lawsuits are settled, the outcome remains to be seen.

What Constitutes a Third-Party in Call Recording Laws in California?

According to Call Recording, a third party could be a vendor with a cloud-based data recording and storage solution which a company contracts with to manage recorded data from inbound customer service telephone calls.

In this case, the need to get permission for the third-party to record is paramount. The third party to said customer service calls could also be the business itself when the customer and employed customer service representative are considered the actual parties to the phone call in question.

Join a FREE California Call Recording Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you live in California and you did not receive a warning when calling a toll-free number, your call may have been recorded in violation of California law, and you may be entitled to compensation. See if you qualify to file a California call recording class action lawsuit.

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