We will not publish a confident list of consent states
Every page on this subject gives you eleven or twelve states with total certainty. The lists do not agree with each other, and that disagreement is the finding.
The short version
- Ten states appeared in the all-party group on every source we checked: California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.
- Nevada, Connecticut and Oregon appear on some and not others. Michigan and Vermont are genuinely unsettled.
- Oregon and Connecticut treat phone calls and in-person conversations differently, which is part of why the lists diverge.
- Transcription is processing what the caller said, so the question does not disappear if you keep no audio.
Why the lists disagree
Recording consent is state law. Here that means old statutes written before mobile phones, court rulings on top of them, and a split between taping a call you are on and one you are not. Boil all that down to a list of state names and you lose the detail that decides the answer.
Oregon is the clearest case. It treats phone calls differently from talks in person, so where it lands depends on which question the list was asked. Connecticut has a similar split. A list with one column has made a choice for you and not said so.
So a confident list of eleven states is one source picking an answer to a murky question, then being copied. We would rather say the ground is uneven and hand you the switch.
The ten we are confident about
Ten states showed up in the all-party group on every list we checked: California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington. If you take calls from any of them, run the notice.
Florida catches people out. Firms working across the Georgia line assume the two match, and they do not. Illinois and Pennsylvania catch out firms whose neighbors have looser rules.
And your phone cannot tell you where a caller is. On a mobile, the area code says where the number was bought, not where its owner stands. That is the case for running the notice on every call rather than guessing at a state.
Transcription is not a way around this
A common line of thought goes like this: we keep no audio, only text, so the taping rules do not apply. We are not lawyers and this is not advice, but we would go careful with that. Making a transcript still means handling what the caller said, and these laws tend to care about catching a call rather than what file it ends up in.
Our view is simple. If you are unsure, the notice costs three seconds and the question goes away. That is cheaper than a legal opinion and you can do it today.
GreetKeeper lets you write the words and choose whether they play. We set no default that pretends to know your state, because we would be guessing and you would never see the guess.
What this post is not
Hear it handle one of your own calls
Your scenario, your greeting, a couple of minutes.