What can ordinary people do to record their mobile phone calls on the conventional mobile phone networks now that Android 15 has completely destroyed this ability and services like TotalRecall no longer work. Ordinary people have never been able to record their phone calls on Apple iPhones. ( I have a sort-of work around that still just about works using a couple of Microsoft Lumia phones running Windows 10 with physical SIM cards but this might end any time soon.) In the UK it is completely legal for security and fraud protection purposes for people to record their phone calls without telling the other party. Today that recorded call can be ported up to an AI service like Otter.AI and moments later there is an accurate transcript of the call with action points. The recording remains for archival purposes so that in cases where there is Legal Professional Privilege (LPP) associated with the call it is always possible to know what was legal advice and what was a joke aside which should never be relied upon
The Commodore Callback looks like a great phone for honest business people to use as their mobile phone. Letâs put call recording with background uploading into the cloud as a default on the Commodore Callback
Seriously? I mean, part of the appeal of SFOS is the fact that no data is uploaded nowhere.
I think you are joking, arenât you?
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No - completely serious. Honest people need to be able to prove what they said and what they have been told
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Dude call recording has been a feature of sfos since⌠a long time, maybe commodore push to disable it, but it should be pretty easy to jailbreak (and itâs linux, nooneâs stopping you from writing a systemd service that will just start recording when dbus of a call comes in)
Edit: and yeah, upload to âsome cloudâ??? Just rsync with your nextcloud instance
Edit2: why even upload anywhere you can use speech note on device Speech Note | OpenRepos.net â Community Repository System to transcribe it, weâre here all for giving up on big tech and big cloud, why give them your (and your call participant) data for free when you can do all you want with it on-device for free? This isnât bionic android pretending to be an OS
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Good - thatâs what I wanted to hear. Whether you upload to sync to a private cloud service or port it off your phone to a local store or a NAS call recording is an essential requirement for honest people and businesses. By including it as a default provision Sailfish can position itself as the only honest OS for mobile communications.
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As I said I cannot guarantee commodore wonât push for its disablement, but currently on sfos in eu recording option is there, it will be easy to reenable if commodore push for mass disablement if they canât deal with 50 different laws in us
Sisters and brothers, letâs pause for a moment and give thanks to technology.
What terrible times those were: ever since humanity climbed down from the trees, honest people have been at a disadvantage. No one kept acoustic records; stone tablets couldnât yet be used for recording like shellac⌠What uncivilized times those were!
Until automatic recording finally arrivedâwithout anyoneâs knowledge or consent! Finally, you could trust people! (OK, you couldnât count on confidentiality, but at least you could count on the fact that you were constantly under general suspicion of cheating someone and ripping them off.) At last, honest people could prove just how honest they were! One might have thought: the sun is rising; the age of honest people is dawning!
But oh, then Commodore came along, and all hope for a golden future for humanity came crashing down! For a brief moment in human history, there was hope thanks to secret recordings, but now: all hope is shattered, and a new, darker age is dawning.
Sisters and brothers, let us mourn! But let us not give up; let us cherish this brief moment of hope forever in our hearts. We must never let go of the memory of this time; it will help us through the dark times ahead, when honest people cannot prove their honesty.
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I was going to say that you still need to remember to record but upon checking there is a setting to automatically record all calls if you so desire (on normal SFOS, as @throwaway69 says we donât know what will end up on the Callback).
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OP might not be, but in Germany honest people and businesses are well adviced to consult § 201 Abs. 1 Nr. 1 und 2 StGB and ask the other end for consent before(!) recording.
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I would illuminate this for the non-Germanic crew by stating that the StGB is criminal law. So weâre not talking about civil liability but criminal liability. Problem will be that youâll have to start recording, to prove you asked 
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Several US states also have an all-party consent requirement, backed by the threat of imprisonment, even though the federal government does not, so it is not a free-for-all elsewhere either.
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+1 for call recording, it is a nice feature that should come with modern OS offerings
And to take it to another level: I wouldnât want to communicateâeither personally or professionallyâwith someone who records our conversation without asking and without letting me know.
That would mean the person doesnât trust me. I find it hard to imagine maintaining personal or professional relationships without a minimum level of trust.
I knowâthis is off-topicâbut if I donât get this off my chest now, itâll keep bothering me for days. Alright, Iâm out. Have fun with BigBrother.
Recording is legal in my country of residence, but anyway with a common sense anyone should be allowed to record calls (just not share them) and it shouldnât be intrusive to the conversation. How many times youâve picked up a call when you were busy, moving, etc got an important information but a 5 minute later couldnât remember it? Apart from that imagine moving to a three-lingual country where none of the languages is your native, then you have an option A) never pick up the phone, B) always reply that you donât understand, C) do you best⌠in the third case the recording really helps review if there was any big misunderstanding and learn from it
I think we can all agree that there are legitimate uses even if we want to preach against it, if you want to be 100% honest you start the recording immediately and say âIâm recording/this call is recordedâ if the other party continues talking that is consent.
Scenarios in which recordings can be very valuable include:
- Calling a service provider to cancel/change plans/complain of some issue (they usually also record).
- When talking to a (new) manager/colleague who is trying to harm you (get you fired) in the work place.
- As the OP suggested when making verbal deals having a recording keeps both sides honest as to the content of what was agreed on (though of course the spoken word leaves plenty of room for interpretation but so does the written word).
In an ideal world you would not need it ever but we donât live in an ideal world.
In the previous millennia internet was open and safe because everyone was reminded by everyone that electronic communication is always seen by someone else than the recipient and is fair to assume that itâs always copied. A very good standards and practices emerged to mitigate this when needed, such as OpenPGP.
Nowadays weâre living in an absurd reality where every now and again someone wants to regulate free digital communication even more. Itâs not only pointless, but looks like itâs made step by step on purpose. Just imagine, when people were fully aware about the nature of digital communication there was nothing to spy on, the state surveillance were âboredâ. Nowadays they have everything shared in plain text in front of their eyes.
An analogy of phone call recording would be a situation where some people walk into a bar demanding everyone inside to cover their ears because they are going to have conversation in laud voice and they believe they have a right not to be ârecordedâ