Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Workplace & Being Recorded

Do you mean telephone conversations? Actually, it may not make a difference, but the phone recording context is a little more familiar and more easily explained. Whether it is legal to record a phone conversation or not depends upon whether the party who asserts his or her rights were violated had "a reasonable expectation of privacy." When there is an announcement to the effect that the call may be recorded, there is no expectation of privacy; the notice does away with it. In an employment situation, there may be something in the policy manual that states or implies that calls made from company phones might be monitored.

So, the bottom line is that it's illegal if you had an expectation of privacy that was reasonable at the time and under the circumstances, and it's legal if you lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy.

What's reasonable? That's one of the things lawyers go to law school to learn about, and judges and courts of appeal often have a field day figuring out and discussing.