Is it legal for a company to record your conversations in the office without your knowledge or consent? It seems there might be a recording device in my department’s office that we didn’t know about. I don’t really have anything to hide, but it seems really strange to me.
I am in Texas, which according to this website has a “one-party consent” law, but also “you may be able to record in-person conversations occurring in a public place, such as a street or a restaurant, without consent.” But I’m not sure if an office counts as a public place.
IIRC one of those “one party” parties has to be a party to the conversation, so for example, pulling a Nixon would be legal in your office (provided you didn’t also start telling people “you two go use my office for this meeting while I’m out”). Sticking hidden microphones in the wall of the cubicle farm (or activating speakerphone microphones) probablyy is not good.
Tapping phones, the same applies I suppose. The person at one end has to be in the know on the recording.
IANAL and fortunately have nothing to do with Texas, but if the law is anything like photography - the “public place” rule applies to expectation of prvacy. You can’t sit by the fountain in the park and expect that nobody would dare take a photo that included you… ditto for places like the fountain or food court in the mall, where the general public could walk by any time. (Although, as private property, the rent-a-cops could politely ask you to stop taking pictures and leave). The same might apply to recording, video or audio. if you are in a place where anyone could walk by at any time holding a video camera, or sit in the bench 10 feet away and hear what you are saying, do you really have any expectation of privacy?
If you’re beating the crap out of Rodney King in the middle of the street you have no expectation of privacy…
The question is whether this same logic applies to a semi-public office space? I’m sure it applies to a private office. It obviously applies to a washroom.
I wasn’t quite sure how much expectation of privacy office workers have. There are security cameras in the hall, but we know about those, they aren’t a secret. We are in an office where usually it’s just the five people in the department and sometimes our boss, but other people from other departments occasionally come by for work or just chit-chat.
But there’s no public coming by. The rare times that sales people or other visitors come by, they have to visit the front office and be escorted over. So it’s not like being at the mall where there’s no expectation of privacy.