All “that’s unethical” means is “I don’t like it.” I don’t personally care whether or not you record any conversation you have, so I vote “that’s not unethical.”
Judge Judy wouldn’t be interested in the calls if there was a written contract.
If it’s not illegal, it’s not unethical. You have no ethical obligation that prevents you from recording him. However, you should always have a written contract with a contractor, and any verbal modifications would be useless.
I think it’s not unethical, but for reasons posted above I don’t really think it will do you much good. If the contractor is in fact a man of his word, you’ll never need to use it, but if he isn’t, having the recording isn’t going to do you any good where the recording conflicts with the written contract.
I take it you missed the part the BBB is a business-driven, business-incentive organization. They promote business, sometimes at the expense of customers. At least they don’t go so far as some ‘consumer choice’ awards that are actually bought by the companies who have been ‘awarded’ them.
I’ve had great results from angieslist.com where consumers rate companies.
And, I think your surreptitious recordings are unethical, regardless of legality to record them.
How about some of you that claim it is unethical explain why? The legality thing is immaterial, since it is by definition immoral to follow a law that conflicts with your morality.
But I suspect it is what Rand Rover says. You don’t like it. And if you don’t like having your business conversations recorded, then I have to wonder why. Privacy concerns only make sense if you think the person compromising it will do something nefarious with it. What can they do if you are on the up and up? (And, apparently, what can they do if they aren’t?)
The fact that it makes you uncomfortable means absolutely nothing. You think I’m comfortable having been ripped off enough times that I feel I need to protect myself? You think I enjoy the consequences of doing my moral duty to out the immoral, so that other people are not harmed by them?
The concept of agreeing to something verbally and then disavowing it in a contract that only a lawyer can understand, and counting on the person not to hire one? That’s what’s immoral. And it’s perfectly legal. Thus any legal concept that enforces that immorality is itself immoral.
Sometimes people get confused about what they say. Sometimes they forget. If the recording was used in such an instance I don’t see a problem.
Your goal for the recording is not realistic. The recording is unusable unless you admit it’s existence, and if you do that the likelihood is that it’s probably illegal or inadmissible, and mentioning you did this will put you at war with the contractor. It provides you with a huge potential legal liability and no real leverage whatsoever.
Give me a real world example of exactly how you would use this recording to “clear up” your written contract rights. What do you REALLY think is going to happen to your relationship with the contractor after you admit you have surreptitiously recorded them.
If you do it just for your own memory aid for double checking the written contract and you will never ever reveal the recording’s existence to anyone it might have some value, although using a simple yellow pad and writing down what he says while talking to you would be more above board and useful IMO.
If you have some fantasy about actually using the recording as a negotiating tool or a or legal aid for enforcing non-written verbal promises you are being very foolish.
The opposite perspective: You agreed to something in writing, and now you’re trying to disavow it based on a conversation we had beforehand? Morality runs both ways, after all.
If I learn that you’re secretly taping me, my assumption will be that you’re trying to do so in order to try to make it look like I agreed to something that I really didn’t. That you’re recording a session where we are floating proposals and ideas, and trying to portray them as binding on me. Or recording the part of one conversation where I say, “I think that’s possible,” but not the part where I say, “but let me run some numbers,” or the subsequent call where I say, “I’m sorry but we can’t make that work after all.”
The reason a contractor insists on a writing is because he’s previously been cheated by customers who misused preliminary conversations. And the reason the terms have been drafted so that “only a lawyer can understand” is because previous contractors and customers have each exploited ambiguities of language to their advantage when the contract was written in plain English.
If recording conversations were as widespread as note-taking, I might feel differently; then, it would just be part of our common understanding of how negotiations are conducted. But it’s not, and so when it happens, I’m going to freight it with certain preconceived notions about why it’s happening.
I’d like to amend: I think secretly taping conversations is quite impolite. In personal life more so than business transactions - the distinction being that I feel that even asking to tape conversations in personal life would be impolite (barring some pressing, well-explained need) whereas asking to tape a business conversation would be perfectly polite in my opinion.
That said, in my view “politeness” and “ethics” are not equivalent (ps to Rand Rover - for me, “impolite” is closer to “I don’t like it” than “unethical” is). So I do think that the OP was pretty rude to do this, and as previously stated I don’t think it will end up doing any good, but still not unethical.
I think it’s unethical for the same reason I think it’s unethical to secretly videotape people without their express prior consent. Is it necessarily going to be used for nefarious purposes? Maybe not. In fact, I’d go so far as to say probably not. But there are enough times when unauthorized recordings have been used improperly to make it necessary for you to ask beforehand to be purely on the up-and-up.
And it doesn’t hurt that it’s outlawed in MANY states in this country. That didn’t happen for nothing. Ethics and legality are not the same thing, of course. But if it wasn’t viewed as unethical, then why was it outlawed anywhere?
You’re secretly recording contactors in the NJ/NY area? Hopefully they’re not in the “Waste Management” business.
Eleven states require both parties to consent to recording, the remaining 39 and the District of Columbia only require one-party consent.
Certainly not conclusive to its morality, but I did want to correct the impression that requiring two-party consent was the norm.
Because it violates two pretty fundamental rules in my system of ethics:
[ul]
[li]honesty[/li][li]informed consent[/li][/ul]
I believe that an ethical adult should apply both of these things to all of his/her interactions with other people, short of having a really compelling reason not to. A police sting operation might be a really compelling reason, but JJ is not a cop conducting a sting, and he didn’t get a warrant to do so (a warrant being a system of review to make sure said reason really is compelling), so this reason doesn’t apply here.
“Really compelling” reasons fall in the range of emergency-level circumstances, btw, where being unethical is a last resort to prevent some grievous harm and the choice basically comes down to the lesser of two evils. And installation of HVAC just doesn’t live up to that standard.
I also don’t think that these are unusual or outlandish standards to have, and they’re a pretty common feature of most ethical systems.
I’m not sure why you’re poo-poohing “I don’t like it.” Of course I don’t like it, I have very good reasons not to like it – I’m sure you can see how removing honesty and informed consent from interactions would lead to serious problems – and I can’t say that I ever have been or will be a fan of unethical behavior. I have no idea why you apparently think that’s silly.
Just to clear a few things up, I decided to record the contractors without thinking about how I might ever use the recording. I did this just so I wouldn’t later regret not doing it. The written contract that I signed provides for most of the guarantees that the salesman gave me verbally.
The OP was really about how ethical this was, and not about how practical (or even legal, for that matter). I only learned that it is legal in NJ after I already submitted the OP.
That said, I’m not sure how those who view my actions as unethical can reconcile their beliefs with what happens everyday in the real world. I work in Manhattan. There are cameras everywhere that record me in public, without my knowledge and without my consent; meaning that I know they exist, but certainly not each and every one of them. Some of these are private and some are government-owned. Are the public and private entities that use such cameras also behaving unethically? You might say that such cameras provide a utilitarian benefit to society by creating a safer environment or a crime deterrent. But I’m not sure how that’s relevant, under the prism of ethics.
You might also say that there is a difference between what’s ethical in public versus private. Well, if I had met the contractor in front of a camera store in Times Square and later was able to obtain that footage from the owner, would that be okay? What if I owned the store?
With all that in mind, I’m concluding that what I did was completely ethical. I think that potential unethicalness (I know it’s not a real word) is really dependent on how I might use the recording. If the contractor told me about his private affairs, and then I later used them against him in any manner, that would be unethical. However, if any potential use is limited to the business arrangement, I still don’t get how it’s unethical.
I guess after thinking about this for a while, Rand Rover’s post is the real answer.
I actually mentioned what I did to some co-workers and friends. Apparently, many people already do this and I’m late to the party. In some cases, it’s a hidden camera to monitor a babysitter or contractor. If this becomes the norm in society, does its place in the spectrum of ethics change?
I’m not “poo-poohing” anything, just calling a spade a spade. Some people think that a discussion of what is and is not ethical is something more than a discussion of whether vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate ice cream, but it’s not. They are both simple expressions of preference.
Welcome to the dark side. 
Quote shortened. Yes, it is unethical for you to secretly record a conversation with the intent of using it against someone if they don’t do what you want. Even if you think they they might try to get you first.
Someone bars the vendor for making certain pomises, yet he does so anyway, verbally. What would be the purpose of proving that a promise was made? To get the vendor fired? Whether something would allow you to get revenge when wronged isn’t a good ethical test.
Why didn’t you tell the contractors you were doing it?
Because it might have scared them away or made them nervous, and I need this job done quickly before it gets hot.
In reality, I looked at my iPhone just before the first one came over and decided to do it on a whim.
Was the recording made of a phone call or a face to face conversation?
Seems to me that the laws people are quoting relate to telephone conversations.
Face to face, although the legality isn’t in question. It’s legal where I live.