Are recording permission and calling permission interchangeable?
No: treat them as separate approvals. Calling restrictions concern initiating particular communications, while recording laws can govern interception or recording of the conversation. Washington, for example, generally requires all participants’ consent to recording private communications, subject to statutory exceptions, and specifies how an effective announcement can establish consent. (ecfr.gov)
Our recommended recording review should cover audio, transcripts, quality-assurance copies, support access and any persistent speaker-identification features. Ask counsel to assess the actual technology and the jurisdictions involved; do not assume that switching off the audio file resolves every processing question.
A useful acceptance test is to have a caller refuse recording. The system should follow the approved alternative path rather than continuing unchanged or falsely saying that nothing is being stored.
When does voice processing become a biometric issue?
Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act expressly includes voiceprints and imposes requirements concerning notice, written release and retention. Ordinary speech recognition should not automatically be described as voiceprint identification, but a supplier’s marketing label is not sufficient to establish the distinction. (ilga.gov)
Recommended supplier questions:
- Does the service create a persistent speaker template or embedding?
- Is it used to identify or recognise the same person across calls?
- Is it retained, shared or used for fraud scoring?
- Can the feature be disabled independently of transcription?
- What notice, permission and deletion controls support the enabled use?
How long must telemarketing records be retained?
The current 16 CFR 310.5 sets a five-year retention period for covered telemarketing records. The FTC’s 2024 amendments expanded recordkeeping and extended prohibitions on material misrepresentations to business-to-business telemarketing. (ecfr.gov)
Important source-quality warning: the FTC’s older general compliance guide still contains a two-year recordkeeping description. For this issue, procurement should use the operative regulation and amendments, not lift an isolated paragraph from the legacy guide. (ftc.gov)
Our recommendation is a retention schedule by record category: consent evidence, campaign material, call-detail records, suppression events, audio, patient information and payment data. Do not convert a telemarketing evidence obligation into an indiscriminate policy of retaining every raw recording indefinitely.