Recording & the law

Abschrift keeps your meetings private. Whether recording a meeting is lawful is a separate question — and it is yours to answer, not the tool's. This page is orientation for doing it right with the least friction. It is not legal advice. Laws differ by country and situation. When it matters, ask a lawyer.

The one rule: ask first

In many countries, recording a private conversation requires the consent of everyone in it — not just the person recording. In some places, recording without consent is a criminal offense (for example § 201 of the German Criminal Code, or Art. 179ter of the Swiss Criminal Code). Deleting the recording afterwards does not undo that. When you record for work, data protection law such as the GDPR applies on top: the transcript contains other people's personal data.

The practical standard, and what the big meeting platforms rely on: announce it before you start, clearly, and give people a real chance to object. Someone who is told what is being recorded and why, and stays in the conversation, is consenting in the way that counts in most places. Someone who was never told is not.

How to announce it

One sentence, before you hit record:

“I'm taking notes with a local AI tool — it transcribes on my machine and nothing is uploaded. Is that okay for everyone?”

• Say it before recording starts, not after.
• Say what it does — notes and transcription — and that it runs locally, with no audio upload. The local part is a genuine advantage here.
• Repeat it when someone joins late.
• If anyone objects: don't record. Take notes by hand — that is always allowed.

A useful side effect: the announcement is spoken into the meeting, so it lands in your transcript — a built-in record that everyone was told.

What Abschrift stores — and what it doesn't

• Everything stays on your Mac. Audio is captured and transcribed on-device. Nothing is uploaded. There is no Abschrift server involved.
• Recordings and transcripts expire. By default, the recording is deleted right after processing. If you keep recordings for segment replay, they expire together with the transcript, on the retention schedule you set. Notes stay.
• Recording is always explicit. Abschrift records only when you start a recording. Paused sections are never captured. There is no always-on listening.
• Notes and transcripts are marked as AI-generated in their file metadata — a transparency practice the EU AI Act requires for AI-generated content. AI output can be wrong, so review it before you rely on it.

Speaker recognition is biometric data

Recognizing the same voice across meetings works by keeping a compact voice fingerprint per speaker in a local database. Voice fingerprints used to identify people are biometric data under modern privacy law — the most protected category there is. Abschrift therefore treats it as an explicit choice:

• It is off by default. You opt in during onboarding or in Settings.
• Fingerprints are numeric vectors, not recordings, and never leave your Mac.
• Deleting a profile deletes the stored voice (Speaker profiles).
• If you record colleagues or clients regularly with recognition on, tell them — it is part of the same announcement.

Cloud notes providers

If you choose a cloud provider for note-writing, only transcript text is sent under your own API key — never audio. Every meeting shows a badge with exactly what left the machine. Remember whose words a transcript contains: sending it to a provider is your transfer, and in a work context your responsibility under privacy law. The fully local alternatives are the built-in engine and Ollama — then nothing leaves the Mac, not even summaries.

Imported meetings

Abschrift can import meetings recorded elsewhere — a Zoom or Meet recording, an exported transcript, notes. Importing changes nothing about the rules above. The consent question was settled, or not, wherever the meeting was recorded. Bringing the files into Abschrift doesn't cure a recording that shouldn't have been made.

What import does help with is what happens afterwards. Once you download a transcript from a meeting platform, you are handling other people's personal data on your own machine. Abschrift gives those files the same treatment as its own recordings — the retention schedule, the local custody, the per-meeting record of what left your Mac — instead of copies accumulating in a downloads folder.

Private vs. work use

In many places, data protection law treats recording for purely personal purposes more leniently. The consent rule above still applies. Recording for work — client calls, team meetings, interviews — brings the full weight of privacy law: have a lawful basis, inform participants, and keep only what you need.

Be especially careful when recording your own employees or people who report to you. Where someone may not feel free to object, staying in the meeting counts for little as consent. Get an explicit okay, and involve whoever oversees employee privacy in your organization — in some countries, an employee representation body has a formal say.

Abschrift's defaults — local-only processing, retention schedules, opt-in biometrics — are built to make the lawful path easy. The obligations stay the organization's, not the app's.

The checklist

• Announce before recording. Repeat for late joiners.
• Don't record if someone objects.
• Leave retention on — keep transcripts only as long as you need them.
• Turn on speaker recognition only if your participants know about it.
• Cloud notes: only with a provider your organization allows.
• Imported meetings: the same rules applied where they were recorded — importing doesn't change your responsibility.

This page is general orientation, not legal advice. Your responsibilities as the person recording are set out in the Terms (§ 5); what the app does with data is in the Privacy policy.