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Comment by gman83 | Hacker News Reader

Why are calls considered off the record? Wouldn't it be trivial for those to be logged too?

There are very strict federal and state laws around who can or cannot record phone calls and how admissible they are in court.

Completely orthogonal to a business's employees' internal communication about that business.

New chat app idea: You "text" a locally running TTS model that uses your phone's modem to call the recipient and talks to the recpient, and replies (from another TTS model on the other side) are run through STT model and appear as text replies.

Yea, interesting, this is where we are.

But pushing this absurdity a bit further, what exactly makes it a voice call instead of a text chat? Either way, there are bits moving over wires.

Let's make a new "voice codec" that can trivially encode and decode to text (like Speak'n'spell phonemes) so that the bits on the wire technically represent some "audio data", but with much less overhead than the usual TTS.

The laws that prohibit phone call recordings without consent is orthogonal to any evidence law that might prohibit their admission in a court case. The fact that they're phone calls has no bearing on admissibility AFAIK (please cite case law if you think I'm wrong).

IAAL, not providing legal advice etc.

I know the not-so-strict laws in my jurisdiction, yet my servant of Google will never deign to permit my recording of any phone calls that go through its delicate body. If I wish to record a phone call, I'll need to put it on speaker and use a second device with mic to pick it up through an oxygen-rich fluid medium.

If anyone knows how to convince Android to change his mind, I'm "all ears", as they say.

* Android is obviously masculine gender, but I've named my phone "Kathryn". Hmm...

The fact that calls occurred is sometimes logged in government. They're not typically recorded in general. (IANAL) Of course, if there were such a requirement, people would simply go to the next level of non-loggability.

Historically, written communications were recorded and had to be retained but other forms of communications did not. One of the things that's happened is relatively little of my professional communications is not recorded in some form these days.

They’re considered off the record because the content of the call generally becomes hearsay inadmissible to prove the truth of what was said.

It's kind of the swiss cheese model. People will slip up--it's very hard to conduct business in entirely off-the-record chats.

I like the recent example of a junior BP trader. He had an opportunity to meet a vice president of the company, and was trying to impress the VP with what the trader's team was doing. The VP responded along the lines of "Gosh, it's funny, what you're describing almost sounds like market manipulation, but it can't be, because I'm sure we wouldn't be doing that."

The junior BP trader then immediately called the senior trader on their office phone. All calls to the office phone are recorded. Throughout the call, the junior trader is persistently trying to ask if what they're doing is market manipulation, and the senior trader keeps cutting him off before he can complete a sentence.

Then the penny drops, the junior trader says, "Hey, I just remembered, I need to run," hangs up, and immediately calls the senior trader on his (unrecorded) cell phone.

_That_ call wasn't recorded, and when asked in court, neither the junior trader nor the senior trader could recall what they discussed.

The judge didn't seem to believe them. BP had to pay a bunch of $, and the junior trader now works somewhere else. :)

And I don't even have a business phone at this point. Nor does pretty much anyone I talk to. So any conversation (and a lot of texts) is over personal devices.

Perhaps it would be different at a financial firm.

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