Recording Law for Employers & Businesses in Texas

Texas follows a “one-party consent” rule for recording conversations. That means you can legally record any conversation you take part in without telling the other person or people. The rule comes from the Texas wiretapping statute, Penal Code § 16.02. It says someone commits an offense only if they intercept a “wire, oral, or electronic communication” without the consent of a party to the communication. The law then carves out an exception: it’s not an offense if the person recording is a party to the conversation or has the consent of one party. In plain terms, if you’re in the conversation, you can record it without telling anyone else. This applies whether the conversation happens in person, over the phone, or through another electronic channel. Texas does not distinguish between in-person oral conversations and phone or electronic communications for consent purposes; all are treated the same under the one-party consent rule. The statute’s definition of “oral communication” requires the speaker to have exhibited an expectation that the communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying that expectation, mirroring the federal reasonable-expectation-of-privacy standard, but this does not change the outcome for a one-party recorder.

Texas does not restrict silent video-only recording (no audio) under its wiretapping laws. The wiretap statute only covers the “aural acquisition” of a conversation’s contents. If your smartglasses capture video but no audio, they are not intercepting a “communication” as defined by the statute. The only Texas law that could apply to silent video is a narrow voyeurism statute, Penal Code § 21.15, which targets secretly recording someone in an intimate area or a bathroom/changing room. That law does not apply to filming public disputes, ordinary workplace interactions, or on-duty police in public. So, if your smartglasses are only capturing video, you can record in most public and workplace settings without running afoul of Texas recording laws. Texas courts have repeatedly held that §21.15 is a narrowly drawn voyeurism provision and does not reach filming public interactions or police encounters in public.

Texas has no law that makes it a crime to record on-duty police officers in public. The state’s Interference with Public Duties statute, Penal Code § 38.15, criminalizes interrupting, disrupting, impeding, or interfering with a peace officer’s (and other listed officials’) duties. The offense is a Class B misdemeanor under §38.15(b); no Class C tier and no subsection (b-1) exist in this statute. The section was most recently amended by Acts 2025, 89th Leg., R.S., Ch. 478 (S.B. 482), eff. Sept. 1, 2025, which added utility-company employees/agents to the protected class and made the offense eligible for disaster-area punishment enhancement — unrelated to filming/recording. A separate 2025 bill, SB 1208, would have elevated the base offense to a state jail felony in response to concerns about people livestreaming or monetizing police encounters, but it died June 2, 2025 and did not become law, so the Class B misdemeanor classification remains current. The statute includes an express defense: “It is a defense to prosecution under this section that the interruption, disruption, impediment, or interference alleged consisted of speech only.” Recording speech alone, without physical interference, cannot be charged as illegal interference. On top of that, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — which covers Texas — has held that the First Amendment protects the right to record police performing their duties in public. 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. Turner remains controlling Fifth Circuit law with no subsequent en banc or Supreme Court reversal identified. A 2015 bill that would have created a 25-foot no-filming zone around officers, HB 2918, did not pass, so no such buffer exists under Texas law.

Texas has a biometric privacy law, the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act (CUBI), found in the Business and Commerce Code § 503.001. It defines “biometric identifier” to include voiceprints — “a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or record of hand or face geometry.” Before capturing someone’s voiceprint for a commercial purpose, you must inform the individual and obtain consent. You must also protect the data with reasonable care, may not sell, lease, or disclose it except under narrow carve-outs, and must destroy it within a reasonable time, not later than the first anniversary of when the collection purpose expires (employer/security-purpose collection: purpose expires at termination). The law is enforced only by the Texas Attorney General, who can seek a civil penalty of up to $25,000 per violation. CUBI was recently amended by H.B. 149 (the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act), 89th Leg., R.S. (2025), eff. Jan. 1, 2026, to add exemptions for AI training and security purposes. If your smartglasses process voice data only to train or evaluate an AI model and do not use that data to uniquely identify a specific individual, the law may not apply. The amendment added subsection (e) with 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; plus (f), a claw-back providing that if a biometric identifier captured under the AI-training exemption is later used for a commercial purpose outside (e), full CUBI possession/destruction/penalty rules re-attach. The amendment also clarified that publicly-available internet images/media of a person do not constitute “informed consent” unless the individual themself made that image public. This threshold question is unresolved by any Texas case law and should be reviewed with product/privacy counsel before relying on the AI-training exemption as a safe harbor. But if the system uses voice to identify or authenticate a specific wearer, full notice and consent rules still apply.

Not every conversation is protected by the wiretap statute. The law only covers an “oral communication” — a conversation where the speaker exhibited an expectation that it would not be intercepted, and that expectation is one society recognizes as reasonable. Texas courts use a six-factor test to decide if a conversation carries a legitimate expectation of privacy: whether the person had a proprietary interest in the place, whether their presence was legitimate, whether they had a right to exclude others, whether they took normal precautions to protect privacy, whether the place was put to private use, and whether the privacy claim fits historical notions of privacy. This test was adopted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Long v. State, 535 S.W.3d 511 (Tex. Crim. App. 2017), which held that the statutory phrase “incorporate[s] the Fourth Amendment’s legitimate-expectation-of-privacy standard.” For example, a conversation in a public classroom with no restrictions on entry would not carry a reasonable expectation of privacy, so recording it would not violate the wiretap law. But a private locker-room speech by a coach would carry such an expectation. If the conversation doesn’t clear this privacy gate, the one-party consent rule never comes into play — no one’s consent is legally required to record it. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reasoned that §16.02’s one-party consent defense is logically downstream of, and only relevant once, the “oral communication” gate is cleared. Texas courts have applied this gate in varied settings: in State v. Scheineman, 77 S.W.3d 810 (Tex. Crim. App. 2002), the court found no reasonable expectation of privacy for conversations between arrestees in a law-enforcement building, even when only the arrestees were present and they subjectively believed they were unobserved. In Meyer v. State, 78 S.W.3d 505 (Tex. App.–Austin 2002, pet. ref'd), the court similarly found no reasonable expectation of privacy in statements intercepted in the back of a patrol car. Conversely, in Roberts v. Houston Indep. Sch. Dist., 788 S.W.2d 107 (Tex. App.–Houston [1st Dist.] 1990, writ denied), the court held there was no reasonable expectation of privacy for a teacher videotaped in a public classroom in full view of students, faculty, and administrators with no restriction on entry and advance notice of recording. These cases illustrate that the privacy gate is highly context-dependent and turns on the totality of circumstances, not merely the location.

Imagine you run a retail store in Texas and outfit your staff with smartglasses that can record video and audio. An employee wearing the glasses steps in to help a customer who becomes angry and raises their voice. The employee records the exchange to document the incident for HR and to protect the store from any false claims. Under Texas law, this recording is legal. The employee is a party to the conversation, so one-party consent is satisfied. The recording takes place in a public area of the store, where customers have no reasonable expectation of privacy. The glasses capture both video and audio, but Texas’s one-party consent rule allows it. The recording is not used to capture a voiceprint for commercial purposes, so the biometric privacy law does not apply. If the store later needs the recording to defend against a claim, it can use the footage without violating Texas law. If the smartglasses’ software processes the audio only to improve speech recognition or noise cancellation and does not store or transmit a voiceprint for identification or commercial purposes, the biometric law’s AI-training exemption may apply. However, if the system uses the voice data to authenticate or identify the employee or customer (e.g., for access control or personalized responses), the exemption does not apply and full notice and consent are required. Employers should document the intended use of voice data and review product architecture with counsel to ensure compliance with CUBI’s evolving requirements.