Recording Law for Video-Only Recording in Texas

Texas wiretap statutes only cover "communications" that include an audio component. The Texas Penal Code §16.02 and the civil counterpart in Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code ch. 123 both define "interception" as the "aural acquisition" of a communication's contents. If you record video without capturing any audio at all, you are not intercepting any "communication" under these laws. This means silent video-only recording is not regulated by Texas wiretap statutes, regardless of where you are or who is in the recording. Texas does not distinguish in-person oral conversations from phone/electronic communications for consent purposes; the one-party consent rule applies uniformly to all three categories of communications under §16.02(c)(4).

The only Texas statute that applies to silent video recording is Penal Code §21.15, titled "Invasive Visual Recording." This law makes it a crime to record someone without their consent if you intend to invade their privacy and either: (1) you record an "intimate area" where the person has a reasonable expectation it's not subject to public view, or (2) you record someone in a bathroom, changing room, or bedroom. The 2015 amendment to §21.15 expanded the private-space coverage to include bedrooms, not just bathrooms and changing rooms. It does not apply to recording in public places, ordinary interactions, or police encounters in public. No Texas case law extends wiretap or eavesdropping liability to silent video capture of public interactions.

You can record silent video in public places without restriction. This includes recording police officers performing their duties in public. Texas has no law creating a buffer zone around officers; a 2015 bill (HB 2918) that would have created a 25-foot no-filming zone failed to pass. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, has ruled in Turner v. Driver, 848 F.3d 678 (5th Cir. Feb. 16, 2017), that the First Amendment protects the right to record police performing their duties in public, and this right is clearly established for conduct after February 2017; officers may still raise qualified immunity for earlier incidents. Texas Penal Code §38.15, which prohibits interfering with public duties, specifically states that a 'speech only' interruption (such as passive recording) is not a violation. 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. 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. Related context: the Fifth Circuit's 2024 en banc decision in Villarreal v. City of Laredo, 116 F.4th 371 (5th Cir. 2024), cert. granted and GVR'd by the Supreme Court in 2024, reflects a more restrictive qualified-immunity climate for citizen journalists in Fifth Circuit interactions with police, though it does not overrule or narrow Turner v. Driver's 'right to record' holding.

Recording silent video inside your own home is unrestricted unless you record someone in an 'intimate area' without consent and with intent to invade their privacy. Penal Code §21.15 applies inside homes, but only for nonconsensual recording of intimate areas, bathrooms, changing rooms, or bedrooms. Recording ordinary conversations or interactions in your home is not restricted by wiretap laws, which require audio capture to apply. There is no separate or stricter wiretap rule for recording inside one's own home; the one-party consent standard in Tex. Penal Code §16.02(c)(4) applies identically regardless of location.

Texas does not use a bright-line rule for when an oral communication is protected under the wiretap statute. Instead, Texas courts apply a full legitimate-expectation-of-privacy (REP) test derived from the Fourth Amendment. Under Long v. State, 535 S.W.3d 511 (Tex. Crim. App. 2017), a conversation qualifies as a protected 'oral communication' only if the speaker exhibited a subjective expectation that it would not be intercepted, and that expectation is one society is prepared to recognize as objectively reasonable. 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 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. Public exposure or institutional settings (e.g., a public classroom or a law-enforcement building) generally do not carry a justifiable expectation of privacy, while restricted-access spaces (e.g., a team locker room) do. This REP gate must be cleared before the one-party consent rule in §16.02(c)(4) can apply; if the gate is not cleared, the statute does not apply at all and no one's consent is legally required.

Texas regulates the capture and use of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints, under the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act (CUBI), Tex. Bus. & Com. Code Ann. § 503.001. The law expressly defines 'biometric identifier' to include voiceprints—'a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or record of hand or face geometry.' Before capturing a biometric identifier for a commercial purpose, a person must inform the individual and obtain consent, protect it with reasonable care, may not sell/lease/disclose 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. Enforcement is exclusively by the Texas Attorney General, who may seek a civil penalty of up to $25,000 for each violation. The Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (H.B. 149, eff. Jan. 1, 2026) amended CUBI to add significant exemptions: (1) a financial-institution voiceprint carve-out tied to GLBA; (2) an exemption for the training, processing, or storage of biometric identifiers involved in developing, training, evaluating, disseminating, or otherwise offering artificial intelligence models or systems, unless the system is used or deployed for the purpose of uniquely identifying a specific individual; and (3) an exemption for AI systems deployed for security-incident/fraud/identity-theft/harassment prevention or investigation purposes. A claw-back provision provides that 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. Publicly-available internet images/media of a person do not constitute 'informed consent' unless the individual themself made that image public. These amendments are directly material to products that process voice data: if the smartglasses' voice processing is characterized as training/evaluating an AI model and does NOT function to uniquely identify a specific wearer, it may fall outside CUBI's scope entirely; if the feature does use voice to identify/authenticate a specific individual, the identification carve-back applies and full notice/consent/retention obligations remain. No Texas case law construes 'capture' (transient vs. persistent processing) or the new 'uniquely identifying a specific individual' language; these are open interpretive questions.

Imagine you are attending a public protest and want to document the event. You set up a camera to record silent video of the crowd and speakers. There is no audio recording. This recording is legal under Texas law because it is silent video only, occurs in a public place, and does not involve recording intimate areas, bathrooms, changing rooms, or bedrooms. Even if police are present and interacting with the crowd, your recording is protected as long as you do not interfere with their duties. Texas wiretap statutes do not apply because no audio is captured, and §21.15 does not apply in public places. The Fifth Circuit has held that the First Amendment protects recording police performing their duties in public, and this right is clearly established for conduct after February 2017.

While silent video recording is broadly unrestricted, there are limits. You cannot record someone in a bathroom, changing room, bedroom, or other private space without consent and with intent to invade their privacy under Penal Code §21.15. You also cannot use any recording—even silent video—to harass, stalk, or invade someone's privacy in other ways. The key is that the recording must be truly silent (no audio) and not involve intimate areas or private spaces where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Texas does not impose a general 'reasonable expectation of privacy' bar on recording people or officers in public places.