US-State
Two-Party Consent States
The short answer. Federal law allows a participant to record a conversation, and states may be stricter. Around a dozen require the consent of all parties, and the commonly cited list is California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington, with Nevada often added. Several of those have carve-outs by communication type, and Michigan's participant rule is genuinely contested. Treat the list as the start of an inquiry. For a dataset, the safe position is all-party written consent wherever the speaker was, because the strictest state in the chain sets the standard.
The law
18 U.S.C. §2511(2)(d)
It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for a person not acting under color of law to intercept a wire, oral, or electronic communication where such person is a party to the communication or where one of the parties to the communication has given prior consent to such interception unless such communication is intercepted for the purpose of committing any criminal or tortious act in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States or of any State.
This is the federal one-party rule, and it is a floor rather than a ceiling. It permits a participant to record, so a project can be lawful federally and unlawful in the state where the speaker sat.
Cal. Penal Code §632(a)
A person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, uses an electronic amplifying or recording device to eavesdrop upon or record the confidential communication, whether the communication is carried on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of a telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars [. . .] per violation, or imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison, or by both that fine and imprisonment.
California is the clearest all-party state, and its statute reaches confidential communications rather than everything said. Section 632(c) covers communications in circumstances that may reasonably indicate a party desires the exchange confined to those present.
Fla. Stat. §934.03(2)(d)
It is lawful under ss. 934.03-934.09 for a person to intercept a wire, oral, or electronic communication when all of the parties to the communication have given prior consent to such interception.
Florida states the rule as a permission conditioned on all-party consent, which is functionally a prohibition. It also carries a civil remedy, so the exposure is not only criminal.
Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 272, §99 B 4
"Interception" means to secretly hear, secretly record, or aid another to secretly hear or secretly record the contents of any wire or oral communication through the use of any intercepting device by any person other than a person given prior authority by all parties to such communication.
The definition is the all-party rule in one sentence: recording is interception unless every party gave prior authority. Massachusetts is also stricter than the federal statute, because its definition of "oral communication" is speech other than what is transmitted over the public air waves, with no expectation of privacy required.
Who it applies to
These laws govern the act of recording a conversation. They do not govern what you may do with a recording you lawfully made, which is a separate question covered on the consent-by-state page. A project can be compliant with the wiretap analysis and still fail on the use question.
The trigger is a private or confidential communication. A single speaker reading a script into a microphone is generally not a conversation, so scripted collection usually sits outside these statutes. The analysis arrives when a recording captures more than one person.
The territorial problem catches companies out. Where a recording crosses state lines, courts have in some cases applied the law of the state where the recorded person was, which means a company can be liable under a law it never considered. The working rule is to satisfy the strictest state represented, because segmenting by jurisdiction after the fact is impossible once the audio is mixed.
A note on the list itself. Michigan's statute is written to cover the private discourse of others, and Michigan courts have generally read that as excluding a participant from eavesdropping on their own conversation, which is why some sources call it one-party and others all-party. Oregon's all-party requirement applies to in-person conversations, with different rules for telephone recording. Connecticut's all-party rule is directed at telephone conversations. Nevada is often listed as all-party because of how its Supreme Court has read the wiretap statute, even though the statutory text reads differently.
- Scripted single-speaker recording: generally outside the wiretap statutes, so consent is a data protection question rather than a recording one.
- Two-person interview or dialogue collection: all-party consent required in every all-party state, and one speaker in one of those states is enough.
- Cross-border calls: apply the strictest state represented, and record where each participant was.
What it costs to get wrong
California provides a private civil remedy under Penal Code §637.2, allowing the greater of 5,000 dollars per violation or three times actual damages, plus injunctive relief and attorney's fees. That per-violation figure is the one to keep in view, because a recording session with several participants is several potential violations.
Florida's civil remedy under §934.10 allows actual damages of not less than 100 dollars per day of violation or 1,000 dollars, whichever is higher, plus punitive damages and fees. Federal criminal penalties under 18 U.S.C. §2511(4) reach up to five years for the underlying offence where the conduct is criminal rather than tortious.
For a data buyer, the penalty that matters most is not the fine. A recording made unlawfully cannot be cured by later paperwork, so a dataset built on it carries a defect that travels with every copy. That is the point at which the supplier's warranty becomes the only remedy available, and warranties are usually capped at the contract value.
There is also an evidentiary consequence that buyers underestimate. If the consent position is unclear, the dataset is hard to sell into any regulated customer, because the buyer's counsel will ask for the recording-state field and the consent record and will not accept a general assurance that the project was compliant.
How to comply when you are buying data
The reliable approach is to stop optimizing. Getting all-party written consent everywhere costs a paragraph on a form and removes the need to know which state each speaker was in at the moment of recording.
The reason to over-comply here is that the cost is asymmetric. All-party consent costs one extra paragraph on a form the supplier is already drafting. Getting it wrong costs a recording that cannot be repaired, a dataset that cannot be sold, and in California a statutory damages claim that starts at 5,000 dollars per violation.
On projects we source, the state of each speaker and the consent basis are recorded in the manifest, so a buyer can see which sessions were in an all-party state without having to reconstruct it. We are a procurement agent and not a law firm, so this is a record of what happened rather than advice on what your jurisdiction requires.
- Ask the supplier to record the state where each session took place. This is the field that makes the rest of the analysis possible, and it cannot be recovered afterwards.
- Use all-party written consent for every session with more than one audible speaker, regardless of the state. The cost is negligible and the alternative is jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction reasoning.
- Check whether the release was actually read aloud or presented before recording began. Consent obtained after the session is a weaker position than consent obtained before it.
- Confirm what happens when a bystander is audible. A voice in the background of a studio recording is a participant whose consent is missing, and the specification should say whether that audio is discarded.
- Do not accept the commonly circulated state list as the analysis. The nuances in Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Nevada are real, and the list changes; verify against the current statute before relying on it.
Related compliance topics
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Voice Recording Consent by State
voice recording consent by state
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EU AI Act Transparency Requirements
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EU AI Act Article 50
eu ai act article 50
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Data Provenance
data provenance
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Data Licensing Agreement
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AI Training Data Laws
ai training data laws
Not legal advice
We are a sourcing company, not a law firm. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and it does not create a lawyer–client relationship. Whether a particular dataset is permissible in your jurisdiction depends on your use case, where you operate, and where the people in the recordings are located. Our role is to document the chain of consent accurately so that your counsel can assess it.
Sourcing data under Two-Party Consent States?
Tell us the language, the hours, and what the data needs to look like. You will get a real number and a real timeline — not a range. If we cannot source it well, we will tell you that instead.
- Pilot batch before the full run, so problems surface early.
- Consent documentation delivered with the data.
- No medical or clinical data. No recorded telephone calls.