Recording Law for Voiceprints & Biometric Data in Texas

In Texas, you can record an in-person conversation or phone call if you are one of the people talking, even if you don’t tell the other person. This is called “one-party consent.” The law that makes secret recording a crime is Texas Penal Code § 16.02. It only applies if the speaker exhibited an expectation that the communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying that expectation. Texas courts incorporate the Fourth Amendment’s legitimate-expectation-of-privacy standard to decide if that expectation was reasonable, adopting a two-part subjective/objective test. In Long v. State, 535 S.W.3d 511 (Tex. Crim. App. 2017), the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals expressly held that the statutory phrase 'an expectation that the communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying that expectation' incorporates the Katz/Harlan reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test. Courts apply a six-factor totality-of-the-circumstances test from Granados v. State, 85 S.W.3d 217, 223 (Tex. Crim. App. 2002): (1) whether the person had a proprietary or possessory interest in the place; (2) whether the person's presence there was legitimate; (3) whether the person had a right to exclude others; (4) whether the person took normal precautions to protect privacy; (5) whether the place was put to private use; and (6) whether the privacy claim is consistent with historical notions of privacy. If the conversation does not clear this threshold (for example, a loud public argument or a conversation in a place open to public view with no restriction on access), the wiretap statute does not apply at all and no consent is legally required, regardless of who is doing the recording. If it does clear the threshold, one person’s consent (yours, if you’re recording) is enough under § 16.02(c)(4). Voiceprints are not regulated under the wiretap statute; they are regulated under the biometric law (CUBI).

Texas law treats a voiceprint as a biometric identifier. That means capturing or storing someone’s voiceprint for a commercial purpose is covered by the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act (CUBI), found in Tex. Bus. & Com. Code Ann. § 503.001. Before you capture a voiceprint for a commercial purpose, you must tell the person and get their consent. You also have to protect the data and destroy it when you no longer need it. CUBI is enforced only by the Texas Attorney General, not by private lawsuits. The attorney general may bring an action to recover a civil penalty of not more than $25,000 for each violation. A 2025 update (H.B. 149, eff. Jan. 1, 2026) added that publicly-available internet images/media of a person do not constitute "informed consent" unless the individual themself made that image public, created three exemptions: (1) the pre-existing financial-institution voiceprint carve-out, (2) the training, processing, or storage of biometric identifiers involved in developing, training, evaluating, disseminating, or otherwise offering artificial intelligence models or systems, unless a system is used or deployed for the purpose of uniquely identifying a specific individual, and (3) AI systems deployed for security-incident/fraud/identity-theft/harassment prevention or investigation purposes. It also added a claw-back provision: if a biometric identifier captured under the AI-training exemption is later used for a commercial purpose outside the exemption, full CUBI possession/destruction/penalty rules re-attach.

Texas defines a biometric identifier as 'a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or record of hand or face geometry.' The definition is in Tex. Bus. & Com. Code Ann. § 503.001. A voiceprint is an example of a biometric identifier, so CUBI applies whenever you capture or use a voiceprint for a commercial purpose. The law does not apply to ordinary audio recordings used for transcription or notes — only to the capture or use of data that can be used to identify a person by their unique biological or behavioral traits.

Texas does not restrict silent video-only recording. The wiretap law only applies to “communications” — conversations or calls — not to pictures without sound. The only Texas law that might limit silent video is Penal Code §21.15 (Invasive Visual Recording), as amended by SB 1317 (84th Leg. 2015), which prohibits nonconsensual recording, with intent to invade privacy, of a person's intimate area where they have a reasonable expectation it is not subject to public view, or in a place in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy — which includes a bedroom, bathroom, or changing room. Recording a public dispute, a police encounter, or an ordinary conversation with your smart glasses while the camera is silent is not restricted by any Texas statute.

Texas has no statutory law-enforcement-specific consent exception restricting recording of on-duty officers in public, and no current statutory distance/buffer requirement for filming police. A 2015 bill (HB 2918) that would have created a 25-foot no-filming zone around officers did not pass. The state’s Interference with Public Duties law, Tex. Penal Code §38.15, makes it a crime to interrupt or impede an officer’s duties, but it explicitly provides an express statutory defense: 'It is a defense to prosecution under this section that the interruption, disruption, impediment, or interference alleged consisted of speech only.' The Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, has ruled that the First Amendment protects recording police performing their duties in public, subject only to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. In Turner v. Driver, 848 F.3d 678 (5th Cir. Feb. 16, 2017), the Fifth Circuit held that the First Amendment protects a right to record police performing their duties in public, subject only to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions — though the court found that right was not yet "clearly established" as of the September 2015 incident in that case (denying damages on qualified-immunity grounds for that plaintiff), meaning the right is clearly established for conduct after February 2017. Just don’t physically block or interfere with the officer.

Imagine you’re wearing smart glasses in a courthouse hallway and a dispute breaks out between two people. You turn on the glasses’ camera but keep the microphone off. Recording the video is unrestricted. If you turn the microphone on and record the conversation, Texas law allows it because you’re part of the conversation. If the glasses extract a voiceprint to identify you as the wearer for an app feature, that voiceprint capture must follow CUBI: you must inform the other person and get consent before capturing the voiceprint for a commercial purpose, unless your system is used only for AI training and does not uniquely identify a specific person, in which case the AI-training exemption may apply.

There is no separate or stricter wiretap rule for recording inside one’s own home — the one-party consent standard applies identically regardless of location. The only privacy-space-specific statute is Penal Code §21.15 (Invasive Visual Recording), as amended by SB 1317 (84th Leg. 2015), which prohibits nonconsensual recording, with intent to invade privacy, of a person's intimate area where they have a reasonable expectation it is not subject to public view, or in a place in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy — which includes a bedroom, bathroom, or changing room. This is a voyeurism-type provision, not a general 'recording in the home' restriction — it would not bar a wearable-device user from recording an ordinary dispute or interaction occurring inside a residence (their own or someone else's, so long as they are lawfully present), only nonconsensual intimate/bathroom/bedroom/changing-room recording made to invade privacy.

Tex. Bus. & Com. Code Ann. § 503.001 requires that before capturing a biometric identifier for a commercial purpose, a person must inform the individual and obtain consent. The statute also requires reasonable care in protection, prohibits sale/lease/disclosure except for narrow carve-outs, and requires destruction within a reasonable time, not later than the first anniversary of when the collection purpose expires. A 2025 update (H.B. 149, eff. Jan. 1, 2026) added that publicly-available internet images/media of a person do not constitute "informed consent" unless the individual themself made that image public, created three exemptions: (1) the pre-existing financial-institution voiceprint carve-out, (2) the training, processing, or storage of biometric identifiers involved in developing, training, evaluating, disseminating, or otherwise offering artificial intelligence models or systems, unless a system is used or deployed for the purpose of uniquely identifying a specific individual, and (3) AI systems deployed for security-incident/fraud/identity-theft/harassment prevention or investigation purposes. It also added a claw-back provision: if a biometric identifier captured under the AI-training exemption is later used for a commercial purpose outside the exemption, full CUBI possession/destruction/penalty rules re-attach.