Is It Legal to Record a Conversation in Maine?

Statute · Penalty: mixed

15 M.R.S. §§ 709-713 (Title 15, Chapter 102, "Interception of Wire and Oral Communications") — specifically §709 (Definitions), §710 (Offenses/penalties), §711 (Civil remedy), §712 (Exceptions); companion provision 17-A M.R.S. §511 ("Violation of privacy") governs non-consensual recording/photographing of images (video) in a "private place" regardless of whether audio is captured.

In-person vs. phone & video calls

No differentiation between in-person (oral) and telephone/electronic (wire) communications for consent purposes — both fall under the same one-party consent framework in Chapter 102. "Wire communication" (15 M.R.S. §709(7)) covers calls/electronic transmissions over wire/cable; "oral communication" (§709(5)) covers in-person utterances made with an expectation of non-interception. Both are governed by the same §710 offense and the same "intercept" definition (§709(4)), which excludes from liability: (A) the sender or receiver of the communication, (B) a person within range of normal unaided (or corrected-to-normal) hearing, and (C) a person given prior authority by the sender or receiver. In effect, a participant in a conversation (or someone one participant has authorized) may lawfully record it — whether in person or by phone — without the other party's knowledge or consent. No stricter separate rule exists for phone vs. in-person conversations.

Recording in public

Maine's "oral communication" definition itself builds in a public-place limit: it only covers communications "uttered by a person exhibiting an expectation that such communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying such expectation" (15 M.R.S. §709(5)). Statements made in public, or to/around a person recording as a participant, generally do not carry a justified expectation of non-interception, so recording disputes/interactions in public places is not restricted by Chapter 102 for a participant. Separately, 17-A M.R.S. §511 supplies the image/video-side "reasonable expectation of privacy" test via its "private place" definition (changing rooms, bathrooms, bedrooms, and similar places) — ordinary public areas, streets, sidewalks, and most face-to-face disputes/police encounters do not qualify as "private places," so image/video recording there falls outside §511 as well.

Recording at home

Maine's statutes do not carve out a separate, distinct rule specifically for "recording inside one's own home" as such. Instead, the same general frameworks apply: (1) under Chapter 102, if the device-wearer is a party to an oral conversation occurring in the home, one-party consent still permits recording; (2) under 17-A §511, a location within a home can qualify as a "private place" (e.g., a bathroom or bedroom) triggering the consent-of-the-person-entitled-to-privacy requirement for image/audio-visual recording, but common living areas of one's own home are not automatically "private places" as to the resident recording them. Because the statute's "private place" test turns on reasonable expectation of privacy in the specific location/room rather than home-ownership per se, a wearable-device user recording their own home is generally in the same legal position as recording anywhere else — the analysis depends on whether the specific room/location is a "private place" and whether the recorder is a party/consenting participant, not on a home-specific carve-out.

Recording the police

Maine is within the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The First Circuit has held that the First Amendment protects the right to record on-duty police officers performing their duties in public: Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78 (1st Cir. 2011) (openly recording police in a public park is protected First Amendment activity, and the right was "clearly established" for qualified-immunity purposes). The First Circuit extended this to secret/covert recording of police and other government officials performing public duties in public spaces in Project Veritas Action Fund v. Rollins, 982 F.3d 813 (1st Cir. 2020), which also assessed Massachusetts's all-party wiretap statute against the First Amendment right to gather news/information. Because Maine is a one-party consent state, and a device-wearer who is party to an encounter with police (i.e., being addressed by/interacting with the officer) is a "party" under §709(4)(A), recording such an encounter does not require the officer's consent under Chapter 102. Maine's wiretap statute itself contains a law-enforcement carve-out (§710(1)) exempting law enforcement/investigative/corrections officers from the "interception" offense when they are "carrying out practices otherwise permitted by this chapter" — this exempts officers' own authorized interceptions (e.g., body cameras, wiretaps under warrant), not civilians; it does not restrict a civilian's right to record police, which instead rests on the one-party-consent structure plus First Circuit First Amendment case law. No Maine statute specifically prohibits recording on-duty police in public.

Video-only capture (no audio)

Silent video with no audio is NOT restricted by the Chapter 102 wiretap statute — that chapter reaches only "wire" and "oral" communications (sound/speech), and a device that merely captures images does not "intercept" anything under 15 M.R.S. §709(4). However, silent video/image capture can independently violate 17-A M.R.S. §511 ("Violation of privacy") if it involves installing or using a device to "observ[e], photograph[], record[], amplify[] or broadcast... images" of a person in a "private place" without consent of the person entitled to privacy there (§511(1)(B)), or use of such a device outside a private place to capture images "originating in that place that would not ordinarily be visible... outside that place" (§511(1)(C)). "Private place" is defined (§511(2)) as "a place where one may reasonably expect to be safe from surveillance, including, but not limited to, changing or dressing rooms, bathrooms and similar places." For the wearable-device use case (public disputes, street interactions, police encounters), silent video in ordinary public/semi-public settings is not covered by §511 because such locations are not "private places" under the statute's reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test.

What counts as a “private” conversation →

Maine writes the gate directly into the statutory definition rather than leaving it to case law. 15 M.R.S. §709(5) defines a protected "oral communication" as one "uttered by a person exhibiting an expectation that such communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying such expectation" (independently re-verified verbatim via direct WebFetch of the official statute page, legislature.maine.gov/statutes/15/title15sec709.html — exact match). This is a two-part test built into the text itself: (1) a subjective prong — the speaker must actually exhibit an expectation of non-interception — AND (2) an objective prong — the surrounding circumstances must "justify" that expectation (functionally a reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test, structurally similar to Katz, and commonly compared in the secondary literature to case-law-built gates elsewhere, e.g. California's Flanagan v. Flanagan or Washington's State v. Clark, though Maine codified this directly rather than developing it through its own case law). Only communications meeting BOTH prongs are "oral communications" that can be "intercepted" at all under Chapter 102 — everything else (a loud sidewalk argument, a statement made in front of visible others, a comment shouted at a public event) falls outside the statute's coverage entirely, and no consent from anyone is required to record it. Separately, for silent video/image capture, 17-A M.R.S. §511 supplies an independent, location-based gate: a "private place" is "a place where one may reasonably expect to be safe from surveillance, including, but not limited to, changing or dressing rooms, bathrooms and similar places" (independently re-verified verbatim via direct WebFetch of mainelegislature.org). This is a place-based reasonable-expectation test rather than a conversation-content test, and it governs video/image capture separately from the oral-communication gate that governs audio. On the case-law question, I independently ran a targeted CourtListener search (via its public search API, reachable directly even though opinion-detail/full-text pages 401/403'd) for the exact statutory phrase "expectation that such communication is not subject to interception" limited to Maine courts, and it returned zero results. A broader search surfaced only State v. Kehling, 601 A.2d 620 (Me. 1991) — a genuine Chapter 102 case, but one addressing §713 admissibility and implied consent under the §709(4) prior-authorization exclusion for a recorded telephone (wire) conversation, not the §709(5) oral-communication/expectation test. This corroborates, rather than merely repeats, the original finding: no reported Maine Law Court decision squarely construes §709(5)'s "expectation ... justifying such expectation" language — Maine's gate appears to operate through statutory text alone rather than through a body of appellate refinement, unlike California or Washington. This remains an open item for a future, more exhaustive case-law pass (CourtListener's Maine coverage and a single session's search budget are not a guarantee of completeness) rather than an affirmative finding that no such case exists. A communication must first qualify as an "oral communication" under 15 M.R.S. §709(5) — meaning the speaker exhibited an expectation of non-interception AND the circumstances objectively justified that expectation — before Chapter 102 applies at all; if it clears that threshold, Maine's one-party consent rule governs (a participant, or someone a participant has authorized, may record without the other party's knowledge or consent, per the §709(4) "intercept" exclusions), but if the communication does not clear that threshold (e.g., a loud public exchange, or an utterance made with no expectation of privacy), no one's consent is required to record it because there is no protected "oral communication" for the statute to reach in the first place. This is confirmed consistent with the existing row's consent_type: "one_party" classification and its communication_split_notes/public_place_exception_notes fields.

Biometric / voiceprint law →

None currently enacted. Maine has repeatedly attempted (and failed to pass) a BIPA-style dedicated biometric statute, most recently as LD 1705, "An Act to Give Consumers Control over Sensitive Personal Data by Requiring Consumer Consent Prior to Collection of Data" (131st Legislature, 2023-24), which would have created 10 M.R.S. ch. 1057, §§9601-9609 ("Privacy of Biometric Identifiers"). A predecessor version, LD 1945, "An Act To Regulate the Use of Biometric Identifiers" (130th Legislature, 2021-22), also died. Separately, a comprehensive privacy bill, LD 1822, the "Maine Online Data Privacy Act" (132nd Legislature, 2025-26), which would have treated biometric data (expressly including voiceprints) as regulated "sensitive data" subject to a strict-necessity collection/processing limit (proposed 10 M.R.S. §§9601-9614), also failed. — None under current Maine law. There is no dedicated biometric-privacy statute and no comprehensive consumer-privacy law in effect in Maine that imposes a consent, notice, or retention/destruction-policy requirement specifically for collecting or processing a voiceprint. (Maine's general breach-notification statute, 10 M.R.S. §1347, and its Unfair Trade Practices Act may still apply in the background the way they would to any sensitive data, but neither requires affirmative consent before capture the way BIPA/CUBI/RCW 19.375 do.) Both failed bills expressly defined "biometric identifier"/"biometric data" to include a voiceprint (verified verbatim: LD 1705 §9601.2 — "including a voiceprint or imagery of the iris, retina, fingerprint, face or hand"; LD 1822 §9602.3.A — "including a fingerprint, a voiceprint, an image of a retina or iris"). CORRECTION to researcher's characterization: LD 1822 did not use a pure "opt-in consent" gate for biometric/sensitive data as the original notes stated — the verified bill text (§9608(1)(A)) instead imposes a strict-necessity data-minimization limit: a controller may not "collect, process or share sensitive data concerning a consumer, unless the collection or processing is strictly necessary to provide or maintain a specific product or service requested by the consumer." This is a materially different (arguably stricter, but not consent-based) mechanism than "opt-in consent," and the live dataset should not describe it that way. Product/legal note: this is a live legislative area — Maine has introduced BIPA-style and comprehensive-privacy bills with biometric provisions in three consecutive legislatures (130th, 131st, 132nd) and all three died, most recently LD 1822 on April 13, 2026. A future reintroduction (likely 133rd Legislature, convening 2027) is plausible and would need to be re-checked; the failed LD 1705 language is a near-verbatim BIPA clone with a private right of action and would meaningfully raise litigation risk for a voice-enrollment feature if reintroduced and passed.

Attorney ethics (ABA Formal Op. 01-422) →

Maine reached the same result as ABA Formal Opinion 01-422 (2001) — and did so two years earlier, in 1999, by expressly rejecting the older per-se-unethical view of ABA Formal Opinion 337 (1974) that a majority of other jurisdictions had followed at the time. Bar Counsel asked whether an attorney's regular, undisclosed practice of taping all her phone calls (with clients, opposing counsel, other lawyers, or the court) violated the Bar Rules, given that Maine and federal law both permit one-party-consent recording. The Commission held that former Bar Rule 3.2(f)(3) (prohibiting "conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation" — the direct ancestor of current Rule 8.4(c), confirmed verbatim in the current Maine Rules of Professional Conduct) is the only rule arguably applicable, and concluded that it "cannot find that electronically recording a conversation without the knowledge of the other participant(s) is per se prohibited by the text of the rule." It explicitly declined to follow ABA Op. 337, describing it as adopted "whole cloth" by many state ethics panels "without analysis of the text" and resting on a conclusory assertion that undisclosed recording "involve[s] dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation." Adopting the reasoning of Oklahoma Bar Op. 307, the Commission held the question is "situation specific": undisclosed recording is permissible in most circumstances, but becomes an ethical violation where the lawyer's own words or conduct affirmatively induce the other party to believe the conversation is confidential/off the record and the lawyer then records and disseminates it anyway, or where the lawyer lies if directly asked whether a call is being recorded — in other words, the recording itself isn't the problem, but accompanying deceit is. The opinion explicitly ties its permissive conclusion to the recording being legal under Maine's own one-party-consent wiretap statute (15 M.R.S.A. § 709) and the analogous federal statute (18 U.S.C. § 2511), noting: "recording a phone call is permitted both by Maine and federal law so long as the person doing the recording is a party to the conversation... However, under federal law, such recording, even by a participant, is prohibited if it is 'for the purpose of committing any criminal or tortious act.'" The opinion has since been formally reaffirmed and is currently displayed by the Board of Overseers of the Bar as "Enduring Ethics Opinion #168 [October 2015]," meaning it remains good law under Maine's current, Model-Rules-based Rules of Professional Conduct (where the operative provision is now Rule 8.4(c), text confirmed) despite the later 2009 rule renumbering.

Can you personally sue over a violation?

Yes — this state gives a private right of action, not just criminal/regulatory enforcement.

Can I record as a guest in someone else's home?

It depends on the specifics of the moment — Maine doesn't give a guest the same clear leeway a homeowner gets, so this is closer to a case-by-case call than a fixed yes or no.

What if I'm on a call with someone in another state?

Play it safe: if either state on the call requires everyone's okay to record, treat the whole call that way — don't assume Maine's rule is the only one that matters just because you're the one wearing the glasses.

If it's legal to record, can it still be used against me later?

Usually, yes. Being legal to record and being protected from a future court case are two different questions — a legal recording can generally still be obtained by the other side later. Recording your own conversation with your own attorney is a separate, more protected situation, but almost everything else — a landlord, a police officer, a family member — isn't automatically off-limits to opposing counsel just because it was legal to capture.