Peter Beckman wrote:
So I've been thinking about call recording laws recently and wanted to get some feedback.
1. As an ITSP, are we held liable for enabling our customers to potentially illegally record a phone call in states where all-party notification is required? Or is it solely on the party who did the illegal recording?
I'm not a lawyer, but if "enabling" is illegal then everyone working at Radio Shack should be in jail. http://tinyurl.com/ylg62tb
2. Interstate phone calls get tricky -- it may be legal for single-party notification in the originating or terminating state, but illegal in the other.
Yep.
3. When a California resident has a California phone number (a state which requires all-party notification and consent of call recording) receives a call when physically in Oregon, which law applies -- CA or OR? Assuming the caller is in a single-party consent state.
Again not a lawyer but I seem to recall that FCC trumps local laws here. -- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay at impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
As an ITSP, we recently rolled out a call recording solution in conjunction with our soft switch. Our "product" and agreements puts all legal responsibility on our customer. The customer must ensure both parties know the call is being recorded and acquire consent. Using this standard, it doesn't matter which state the call originates or terminates. As for the ITSP's responsibilities, we must ensure our total solution is capable of providing the required auto-disclaimer on inbound calls and the flexibility to not record outbound calls (unless the customer reads the disclaimer on every outbound call too). Provided the customer is educated on how to properly use the system, knowing when and which calls are recorded, there should be no legal problem. Any user not wishing to consent can simply hang up. David M. Sarvai Director of Engineering DSCI Corporation 1 Sundial Ave. Suite 514 Manchester, NH 03103 Voice: 781-861-4678 CELL: 781-254-3053 FAX: 781-861-4675 Customer Care: 1-877-344-7441
David -- Your approach seems interesting and safe, but I think the challenge is building a useful product around restrictions like this. Which of your customers wants to say, "Is it OK if I record this call?" It's almost like saying, "I don't trust that you're going to keep to your word, so I'm going to record this call as evidence for the lawsuit." "Call recording" just seems so slimy. It brings up thoughts of White House recordings and FBI wiretaps. But in reality, recording the call can be a useful way to get accurate notes from a call. I just really doubt that many ordinary folks -- accountants, doctors, lawyers, architects, car dealers, real-estate agents, salesmen, bankers -- are going to have the guts to get permissions from their customers, or their colleagues, or their suppliers. -- All opinion, not to be confused with factual data. On Jan 25, 2010, at 8:36 AM, David Sarvai wrote:
As an ITSP, we recently rolled out a call recording solution in conjunction with our soft switch. Our "product" and agreements puts all legal responsibility on our customer.
The customer must ensure both parties know the call is being recorded and acquire consent. Using this standard, it doesn't matter which state the call originates or terminates.
As for the ITSP's responsibilities, we must ensure our total solution is capable of providing the required auto-disclaimer on inbound calls and the flexibility to not record outbound calls (unless the customer reads the disclaimer on every outbound call too).
Provided the customer is educated on how to properly use the system, knowing when and which calls are recorded, there should be no legal problem. Any user not wishing to consent can simply hang up.
David M. Sarvai Director of Engineering DSCI Corporation 1 Sundial Ave. Suite 514 Manchester, NH 03103 Voice: 781-861-4678 CELL: 781-254-3053 FAX: 781-861-4675 Customer Care: 1-877-344-7441 _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
mark r lindsey at e-c-group.com http://e-c-group.com/~lindsey +12293160013
If you are offering call recording, how long to you retain the calls on your servers? . Richey -----Original Message----- From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Mark R Lindsey Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 9:30 AM To: David Sarvai Cc: VoiceOps Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Call Recording Laws in the US David -- Your approach seems interesting and safe, but I think the challenge is building a useful product around restrictions like this. Which of your customers wants to say, "Is it OK if I record this call?" It's almost like saying, "I don't trust that you're going to keep to your word, so I'm going to record this call as evidence for the lawsuit." "Call recording" just seems so slimy. It brings up thoughts of White House recordings and FBI wiretaps. But in reality, recording the call can be a useful way to get accurate notes from a call. I just really doubt that many ordinary folks -- accountants, doctors, lawyers, architects, car dealers, real-estate agents, salesmen, bankers -- are going to have the guts to get permissions from their customers, or their colleagues, or their suppliers. -- All opinion, not to be confused with factual data. On Jan 25, 2010, at 8:36 AM, David Sarvai wrote:
As an ITSP, we recently rolled out a call recording solution in conjunction with our soft switch. Our "product" and agreements puts all legal responsibility on our customer.
The customer must ensure both parties know the call is being recorded and acquire consent. Using this standard, it doesn't matter which state the call originates or terminates.
As for the ITSP's responsibilities, we must ensure our total solution is capable of providing the required auto-disclaimer on inbound calls and the flexibility to not record outbound calls (unless the customer reads the disclaimer on every outbound call too).
Provided the customer is educated on how to properly use the system, knowing when and which calls are recorded, there should be no legal problem. Any user not wishing to consent can simply hang up.
David M. Sarvai Director of Engineering DSCI Corporation 1 Sundial Ave. Suite 514 Manchester, NH 03103 Voice: 781-861-4678 CELL: 781-254-3053 FAX: 781-861-4675 Customer Care: 1-877-344-7441 _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
mark r lindsey at e-c-group.com http://e-c-group.com/~lindsey +12293160013 _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
If you are offering call recording, how long to you retain the calls on your servers? . It depends on what the customer wants to pay for. We charge per Gigabyte for storage. We have a handy calculator which estimates the amount of space needed for X users, who talk for Y minutes a day... something like: Users * Minutes * Days * MB/Minute /1000 = GB Storage Required As we charge for storage, it is in our best interests if the customer wants us to maintain years of storage, but realistically, customers only want to pay for a months worth. Dave
On Mon, 25 Jan 2010, David Sarvai wrote:
It depends on what the customer wants to pay for. We charge per Gigabyte for storage. We have a handy calculator which estimates the amount of space needed for X users, who talk for Y minutes a day... something like:
Users * Minutes * Days * MB/Minute /1000 = GB Storage Required
As we charge for storage, it is in our best interests if the customer wants us to maintain years of storage, but realistically, customers only want to pay for a months worth.
When Amazon S3 sells storage for $0.15/GB, and you compress using 8kHz and a decent rate mp3, or about 2kb per second on average, we can store 138.89 hours of Voicemails, Call Recordings and Outgoing Messages for $0.15 (plus a little overhead for bandwidth). Each VoIP and web server can download from S3 independently (we do cache some heavily used files locally) and do local transcoding as needed. The downloads are instantaneous enough that the user wouldn't notice (about 100ms for a 150kb MP3 file (75 seconds). Obviously if someone wants to store 10,000 hours of call recordings, and it is costing you $10.81 a month just for that user, I guess you could charge them, but if they were using your service THAT much wouldn't you make enough off of them each month that you didn't have to nickle and dime them? Beckman --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman at angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
participants (5)
-
beckman＠angryox.com -
dsarvai＠DSCICORP.com -
jay＠west.net -
lindsey＠e-c-group.com -
mylists＠battleop.com