Why we can’t record mobile phone calls — and why we should be able to

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Several years ago, I had to deal with a situation that may be familiar to a lot of people: I was slammed with a series of high medical bills that had been denied by the insurance company. The insurance company said the doctor's bills were wrong. You get the idea, his facilities weren't in the network. It took over a year and many phone calls to iron out the issue, and I wouldn't have gotten through it had I not been able to record each phone call I made with the insurance company.

It would be nearly impossible today.

Federal law in the US states that you can legally record a phone conversation if you are in it. State laws are different. Most states follow the federal guidelines, but some require all parties to consent to the recording. When you call a business, you get a recording that tells you that your call may be recorded. That's why.

There are reasons for those restrictions. If a phone call is recorded without the person's knowledge, the person's right to privacy can be severely impacted, which is why warrants are usually needed for a law enforcement authority to tap a suspect's phone.

It is nearly impossible to record calls made by your phone in the US because of legal ramifications and completely ignoring the needs of your customers. The last method third-party app developers had for getting around its restrictions was by using the accessibilityAPI. In the US, the only way to record calls is via the internet, and that's because of the lack of that. Voice does not allow you to record outgoing calls, even though it says the call is being recorded when it is switched on.

The options for iPhone users seem to be the same.

According to their description, there are still apps that record phone calls. The third party is usually the recording service provided by the developer. I haven't tried any of them, but I can tell you that most of them are expensive and quirky.

Unless I have a place where I can use my phone on a speaker and set up a recorder, I have no way of recording an outgoing phone call. I need to go back to the old-fashioned way of grabbing the nearest piece of paper and writing notes as quickly as possible, hoping that I get everything right. I don't have a way of offering a recording or transcript of a call to an insurance company or other business, I don't have a way of making sure I have a record of my doctor's instructions, and I don't have a way of recording my elderly relative

This is very frustrating. Businesses should not be able to casually record conversations that I can't. As long as I can get that conversation on the record, I'm perfectly happy to have an app announce that a conversation is being recorded.

For a short time, I was able to use a simple technology to track my phone conversations so that I could prove that I didn't owe thousands of dollars in medical bills. In the future, perhaps in this time of security cameras, drones, and other more intrusive possible privacy violations, Apple and Google will rethink their policies. I'm not going to hold my breath.