Is It Legal to Record a Conversation in Oregon?

Statute · Penalty: misdemeanor

ORS 165.540(1)(c) (core all-party notice/consent rule); ORS 165.540(5)(b) (law-enforcement exception); ORS 165.540(9) (penalty)

In-person vs. phone & video calls

Oregon does split sharply by communication channel — more sharply than the state's 'all-party consent' reputation suggests. In-person 'conversations' are governed by ORS 165.540(1)(c), which bars recording 'if not all participants in the conversation are specifically informed that their conversation is being obtained' — an all-party NOTICE rule (the state's headline classification). By contrast, ORS 165.540(1)(a) governs 'telecommunication[s]' and 'radio communication[s]' (ordinary phone calls, landline or cellular) and by its own terms only restricts a person 'to which the person is not a participant' from obtaining the call, and even then only requires that 'consent is given by at least one participant.' Textually, a participant who records their own phone call falls outside (1)(a) altogether (they are not 'a person... not a participant'), so nothing in the statute requires them to notify or get consent from the other party — phone/radio calls are recordable by a participant with no consent needed from anyone else, while in-person conversations require notice to everyone. This textual reading is corroborated by Oregon State Bar Formal Ethics Opinion No. 2005-156 (revised 2015, approved by the OSB Board of Governors September 2015), which states as a 'general rule' that 'Oregon law allows one party to a telephone conversation to record the conversation without notice to or consent of the other person,' while 'in-person conversations may not be recorded unless all persons participating know or have notice that the conversation is being recorded.' I did not find a reported Oregon appellate/Supreme Court decision squarely testing the specific fact pattern of an ordinary participant recording their own phone call outside any home-related context — the reported cases touching (1)(a), e.g. Checkley v. Boyd, 198 Or App 110 (2005), involve recordings made in the recorder's home and so test the ORS 165.540(3) home exception rather than the phone-call/participant point in isolation. The conclusion rests on the statute's plain text plus the OSB opinion (authoritative, but not judicial precedent) — confidence is high on the statutory-text reading itself, medium on the absence of a squarely-on-point litigated case. There is also a further, easily-missed wrinkle relevant to a glasses product: a 2021 amendment (Or Laws 2021, c.357) moved video-conferencing calls (Zoom/Teams/FaceTime-style calls) OUT of the one-party-friendly 'telecommunication'/'radio communication' bucket and INTO the all-party-notice 'conversation' bucket. ORS 165.535(1) now defines 'conversation' to expressly 'include[] a communication occurring through a video conferencing program,' while ORS 165.535(3)(b) and (4)(b) expressly exclude video-conferencing communications from the 'radio communication' and 'telecommunication' definitions. Net effect: an ordinary voice phone call is effectively one-party-consent under (1)(a), but a video call taken through a video-conferencing app is treated like an in-person conversation and requires all-party notice under (1)(c) — a real, current-law distinction between call types. (ORS 165.540(6)(b) separately exempts video-conference recordings made to capture evidence of unlawful activity in coordination with law enforcement, an attorney, or a regulatory body.)

Recording in public

No general public-place exception exists for Oregon's core in-person-conversation rule, and this was directly litigated. Oregon's all-party notice requirement for 'conversations' under ORS 165.540(1)(c) applies regardless of whether the conversation happens in public, and both the majority and the dissent in the en banc Ninth Circuit's Project Veritas v. Schmidt (Jan. 7, 2025, No. 22-35271) agree on this reading of Oregon law. The en banc majority rejected the argument that the statute should not reach recordings made in public places such as 'cafes and parks,' holding that 'Oregon's significant interest in protecting private conversations includes private conversations that occur in public or semi-public locations... even if a conversation may be overheard in public, Oregon maintains an interest in preventing its recording,' citing Katz v. United States (protecting what a person 'seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public') and Carpenter v. United States ('A person does not surrender all... protection by venturing into the public sphere'). Judge Lee's dissent (joined by Judge Collins) makes the same descriptive point even more bluntly while criticizing the law: Oregon's statute 'criminalizes audio-recording someone — even conversations in public with no reasonable expectation of privacy,' illustrating that 'a citizen in Oregon cannot lawfully audiotape a public official berating an employee at a Chipotle or uttering a racial slur on a public sidewalk — unless that citizen expressly tells that official he is being recorded.' So, unlike many one/two-party-consent states that condition liability on a 'reasonable expectation of privacy,' Oregon's all-party notice rule for audio of in-person conversations is a bright-line rule that does not turn on location. That said, Oregon does carve out a narrow, closed list of specific public/semipublic PROCEEDINGS (not 'public places' generally) at ORS 165.540(6)(a): the (1)(c) prohibition does not apply to a person who records oral communications using an unconcealed recording device (or via video conferencing) at (A) 'public or semipublic meetings such as hearings before governmental or quasi-governmental bodies, trials, press conferences, public speeches, rallies and sporting or other events,' (B) 'regularly scheduled classes or similar educational activities' in public or private institutions, or (C) 'private meetings or conferences if all others involved knew or reasonably should have known that the recording was being made.' This is meaningfully narrower than a general public-place carve-out — per the Project Veritas dissent's own illustration, recording a stranger's outburst at a restaurant or on a sidewalk is not one of the enumerated proceeding types and would not qualify. Separately, ORS 165.540(5)(b) (already reflected elsewhere in this row via police_recording_note) lets a person openly record an on-duty law-enforcement officer from a lawful vantage point without notice — but that exception is keyed to the participant being a police officer performing official duties, not to the encounter simply occurring in public. (Silent, audio-less video recording in public is unrestricted by this statute entirely — already captured in this row's video_only fields — because ORS 165.535/165.540 reach only audio.)

Recording at home

Yes — recording inside the wearer's own home is treated very differently, via a real and heavily-litigated carve-out: the 'homeowner's exception' at ORS 165.540(3), which provides (official statutory text, confirmed verbatim against oregonlegislature.gov): 'The prohibitions in subsection (1)(a), (b) or (c) of this section do not apply to subscribers or members of their family who perform the acts prohibited in subsection (1) of this section in their homes.' Unlike the narrow, proceeding-specific exceptions in public_place_exception_notes, this reaches all three prohibited-act categories — telecommunications/radio interception (1)(a), line-tampering (1)(b), AND in-person conversation recording (1)(c) — for a 'subscriber' (to a telecommunication or radio service) or a member of that subscriber's family, when the recording act happens in their home. Three Oregon Court of Appeals decisions (all read in full from the Oregon Judicial Department's official opinion archive) confirm this is read broadly: (1) State v. Evensen, 298 Or App 294, 447 P3d 23 (2019) — the minor victim (referred to in the opinion as 'M'), who is the daughter of defendant's brother-in-law, secretly audio-recorded a face-to-face conversation with the defendant on her iPhone (which had no active telephone subscription of its own) at defendant's house in a first-degree sexual abuse prosecution; the trial court found M was defendant's family member and the recording occurred in their shared home. The court held the exception 'applies to subscribers to telecommunications and radio services (and their family members) who, in their homes, engage in conduct otherwise prohibited by ORS 165.540(1)(c), regardless of whether the subscribed-to service is utilized to obtain the conversation' — the exception is not limited to phone-related recordings, and it did not matter that M's iPhone had no active phone service. (2) State v. Rainey, 294 Or App 284, 431 P3d 98 (2018) — holds the exception turns on where the RECORDING ACT occurs, not where the conversation itself takes place. Quiros, upstairs in a second-story bedroom of the home she shared with her stepbrother Coleman, pointed her cellphone out the window and recorded a threat-laden property-line argument happening outside between Coleman and their neighbor, the defendant (Rainey) — Quiros was not a participant in that conversation. The court held: 'What must occur "in their homes" are "the acts prohibited in subsection (1)"... Nothing in the wording of ORS 165.540(3) can be plausibly read to state an exception based on where the conversation itself takes place' — so the exception applied even though the recorded conversation happened outside the home. (3) Checkley v. Boyd, 198 Or App 110, 107 P3d 651 (2005) — the exception covers a person who was not a participant in the phone calls at all. Plaintiff recorded telephone conversations occurring between two other people (his disabled brother, Wagner, and the Boyds) while Wagner resided with plaintiff in plaintiff's home; the court held that because the recording was lawful under the (3) exception, plaintiff was 'not prohibited by ORS 165.540(1)(e) from using' the recordings — a lawfully-obtained recording under the home exception is not 'obtained... in a manner prohibited by this section' for purposes of the (1)(e) use/disclosure prohibition. Net effect: within their own home, a telecom/radio subscriber or their family member can lawfully audio-record essentially any conversation or call they can access there — their own conversation, a family member's conversation, even a call or conversation between two other people — without notice or consent to anyone, and can also use the resulting recording. This is a considerably broader carve-out than 'your home is just another location'; it is an affirmative, judicially-confirmed home-recording privilege tied to subscriber/family status and the location of the recording device, not to who is being recorded. Given the product's likely use case (an outdoor/mobile smartglasses default), this exception is most relevant if the wearer's detected location is their own registered home address. Confidence is high given the exception is confirmed by three on-point, directly-read Court of Appeals opinions plus the plain statutory text.

Recording the police

Law-enforcement exception (ORS 165.540(5)(b)) permits recording on-duty police only if made openly/in plain view, audible to normal unaided hearing, and from a place the recorder may lawfully be. Secret recording of police does NOT qualify and remains a Class A misdemeanor (ORS 165.540(9)). The statute was upheld en banc by the Ninth Circuit against First Amendment facial and as-applied challenges (Project Veritas v. Schmidt, Jan. 7, 2025) under intermediate scrutiny as content-neutral and narrowly tailored.

Video-only capture (no audio)

Statute regulates audio only — does not restrict silent video-only recording or photography.

What counts as a “private” conversation →

Oregon has essentially no reasonable-expectation-of-privacy ("REP") gate for in-person conversations — the statute is worded broadly rather than conditioned on a privacy test. ORS 165.535(1) defines the operative term "conversation" simply as: "the transmission between two or more persons of an oral communication which is not a telecommunication or a radio communication, and includes a communication occurring through a video conferencing program" (video-conferencing clause added by Or Laws 2021 c.357 §1). Nothing in that definition requires the communication to be secret, confidential, or made with any expectation that it won't be overheard/recorded — it only excludes telecommunications/radio communications (which get separate, one-party-friendly treatment under ORS 165.540(1)(a)). ORS 165.540(1)(c) then bars obtaining "the whole or any part of a conversation by means of any device, contrivance, machine or apparatus, whether electrical, mechanical, manual or otherwise, if not all participants in the conversation are specifically informed that their conversation is being obtained" — again with no privacy qualifier. I independently re-fetched and confirmed both quotes verbatim against the official Oregon Legislature ORS 165 text (extracted directly from the page's underlying HTML, not a summarized rendering), so the statutory text is accurate. This textual absence of any REP/confidentiality gate was directly litigated and confirmed by the en banc Ninth Circuit in Project Veritas v. Schmidt, No. 22-35271 (9th Cir. Jan. 7, 2025) (opinion by Judge Christen, dissent by Judge Lee, joined by Judge Collins) — I downloaded and full-text-searched the primary opinion PDF and confirmed both quotes verbatim. The court rejected the argument that the statute shouldn't reach conversations in "cafes and parks," holding: "Oregon's significant interest in protecting private conversations includes private conversations that occur in public or semi-public locations... Thus, even if a conversation may be overheard in public, Oregon maintains an interest in preventing its recording," citing Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967) and Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 310 (2018) — both citations confirmed verbatim in the opinion text. The dissent (Judge Lee, joined by Judge Collins) made the same descriptive point while criticizing the breadth of the law: "Oregon does not just ban surreptitious recordings that may implicate privacy concerns: It also criminalizes audio-recording someone—even conversations in public with no reasonable expectation of privacy—if 'not all participants in the conversation are specifically informed that their conversation is being obtained,'" illustrating that a citizen "cannot lawfully audiotape a public official berating an employee at a Chipotle or uttering a racial slur on a public sidewalk" without announcing the recording — confirmed verbatim. So rather than a multi-factor REP test (e.g., California's Flanagan v. Flanagan) or a bright-line "no one else present" test (Washington's State v. Clark line), Oregon's approach is: virtually any oral, in-person, multi-party communication is a "conversation" by definition, full stop. One correction to the original analysis: it characterized ORS 165.540(6)(a) (enumerated public/semipublic proceedings), the home exception (3), and the on-duty-police exception (5)(b) as "the only carve-outs" — this understates the statute's actual exception list, which I re-confirmed in full from primary source. The complete set of carve-outs also includes: felony-endangering-life recordings (5)(a); law-enforcement-facility/custodial interviews under ORS 133.400/133.402 (5)(c); uniformed officers' body-worn and vehicle-mounted cameras (5)(d); taser-mounted recording devices (5)(e); telecom/radio company employees and jail/corrections officials acting in that capacity (2)(a); broadcast reception (4); a video-conferencing exception for recordings made to capture evidence of unlawful activity in coordination with law enforcement, an attorney, or a regulatory/enforcement entity (6)(b); and amateur/citizens-band radio and public-safety radio interception (7)-(8). None of these additional exceptions undermine the core "no REP gate" conclusion (none of them are privacy-conditioned either — they are status-, location-, or purpose-based, not REP-based), so the substantive finding is unaffected, but the "only carve-outs" phrasing should not be read as an exhaustive list of ORS 165.540's exceptions. Because ORS 165.535(1) defines "conversation" without any privacy/confidentiality qualifier, there is effectively no independent REP-style gate to clear in Oregon (unlike REP-gated states such as California or Washington): almost any oral in-person exchange between two or more people is automatically a "conversation" subject to ORS 165.540(1)(c)'s all-party notice rule — which matches and directly supports the existing row's "all_party" consent_type classification — regardless of location or how public the setting is. The escape routes are a set of specific, non-privacy-conditioned statutory carve-outs (enumerated public/semipublic proceedings and classes under (6)(a), certain private meetings with known/reasonably-knowable recording under (6)(a)(C), the home/subscriber exception under (3), the on-duty-police exception under (5)(b), and several narrower exceptions — felony-in-progress, custodial interviews, police body/vehicle cameras, taser recordings, telecom-employee/corrections-official duties, broadcast reception, law-enforcement-coordinated video-conference recordings, and amateur/public-safety radio) rather than a case-by-case privacy determination. This is confirmed consistent with the existing row's consent_type ("all_party") and does not change the state's classification or default recommendation for the glasses product.

Biometric / voiceprint law →

Oregon Consumer Privacy Act (OCPA) — Applicability threshold first: OCPA only binds a "controller" that, in a calendar year, controls/processes personal data of 100,000+ Oregon consumers (excluding data solely for completing payment transactions), or 25,000+ consumers while deriving 25%+ of gross revenue from selling personal data (ORS 646A.572, confirmed verbatim in Section 2 of the enrolled bill) — a small/early-stage deployment of live.law's glasses in Oregon could fall below this threshold and not yet be "covered" at all. Nonprofits got a delayed compliance date of July 1, 2025 (now passed). If covered: (1) "Biometric data" is defined to include "voiceprint" and is automatically "sensitive data" (ORS 646A.570(3)(a), (18)(a)(D), verbatim confirmed) — but the definition excludes an audio/video recording itself, and excludes data derived from a recording, UNLESS that data is generated or used "for the purpose of identifying a specific consumer" (ORS 646A.570(3)(b)) — a voiceprint-based wearer-identification feature would squarely satisfy that carve-back-in. (2) A controller "may not... [p]rocess sensitive data about a consumer without first obtaining the consumer's consent" (ORS 646A.578(2)(b), verbatim confirmed) — i.e., opt-in consent is required before capturing/processing the voiceprint, not opt-out. (3) "Consent" is statutorily defined (ORS 646A.570(6), verbatim confirmed) as "an affirmative act by means of which the consumer clearly and conspicuously communicates the consumer's freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous assent," bars dark-pattern UI, and states "the consumer's inaction does not constitute consent." (4) The controller must give consumers "an effective means" to revoke consent, at least as easy as the method used to give it, and must stop processing within 15 days of revocation (ORS 646A.578(1)(d), verbatim confirmed). (5) The controller must maintain a privacy notice listing categories of sensitive data processed, purposes, and how rights are exercised (ORS 646A.578(4), verbatim confirmed). (6) Because processing sensitive data is deemed a "heightened risk of harm" activity, the controller must conduct and retain (5 years) a documented data protection assessment, producible to the AG on request (Section 8, ORS 646A.586). Unlike Illinois BIPA: Oregon has no dedicated biometric-specific statute and no BIPA analogue; OCPA does not mandate a written, publicly available biometric retention/destruction schedule, and provides no statutory per-violation damages for private plaintiffs (there is no private right of action at all). No Oregon appellate/supreme court decision (nothing like Cothron v. White Castle) has yet construed whether momentary, non-stored voiceprint processing counts as "processing" under this statute — that question is untested.

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

Oregon does not treat a lawyer's undisclosed recording of a conversation as automatically or per se unethical — but the state authority reaches that result independently, without citing or engaging ABA Formal Opinion 01-422 at all, so "follows" (as in explicit adoption of the ABA opinion) overstates the connection; "rejects the per-se-unethical rule" is the more accurate label for what Oregon's own authority actually does. Formal Opinion 2005-156 poses two facts — Lawyer A wants to secretly tape-record a phone call, Lawyer B wants to secretly record an in-person conversation — and answers "Yes, qualified" for the phone call and "No" for the in-person conversation, based entirely on whether the recording is legal under Oregon's wiretap statute (ORS 165.540) and case law, not on any separate honesty/dishonesty analysis. Verified verbatim against the official OSB PDF: "As a general rule, Oregon law allows one party to a telephone conversation to record the conversation without notice to or consent of the other person. However, in-person conversations may not be recorded unless all persons participating know or have notice that the conversation is being recorded." And: "A lawyer who makes a recording in knowing disregard of statutory prohibitions to the contrary would be in violation of Oregon RPC 3.3(a)(5), which prohibits a lawyer from knowingly engaging in illegal conduct. See also Oregon RPC 8.4(a)(2)... If the substantive law does not prohibit a recording, however, and in the absence of conduct that would affirmatively lead a person to believe that no recording would be made, the lawyer may make a recording." Critically, the opinion never invokes RPC 8.4(a)(3) (Oregon's dishonesty/deceit/misrepresentation rule, verified in the official RPC text) — the rule that the old, now-withdrawn ABA Formal Opinion 337 (1974) used to treat secret recording as inherently dishonest, and that ABA Opinion 01-422 (2001) addressed when it held secret recording is not per se dishonest. Because Oregon's opinion resolves the question entirely through its own illegal-conduct/criminal-act framework tied to the wiretap statute, rather than through a dishonesty-rule analysis, it independently arrives at a permissive, non-per-se-unethical result that is substantively parallel to 01-422's conclusion (legal + no additional affirmative deception = permitted) without adopting or citing 01-422's reasoning. For the recording-consent map: because Oregon is an all-party-notice state for in-person conversations, the ethics answer collapses into the wiretap-statute answer for in-person recording, while telephone recording is treated more permissively per the opinion's own (somewhat dated) discussion — this is already fully documented, and is not in tension, with this same dataset's OR "communication_split_notes" field, which independently sources the identical phone/in-person split to this same opinion.

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

It depends on the specifics of the moment — Oregon 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?

Which state's rule actually governs an interstate call touching Oregon isn't clearly settled. The safest approach is still to follow whichever state — yours or theirs — requires more from you.

This is a newer, less-settled corner of the law — our own research is still being refined here, so treat this as a starting point, not a final answer.

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. That's especially true the moment a third person is present or on the line — even one extra listener can be enough to strip away legal protection here. 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.