Will the Librem 5 be able to record calls and save them to storage?

To be brief:

  • In general, disabling a feature because “it might be used for illegal purposes” is an outrage.
  • In particular, making up laws that forbid me to record my own conversation is even a bigger outrage.

I don’t mind if someone records my private conversations with him, for whatever reason. Only if he publishes them without asking for permission first, I might mind.

Also, I feel the laws that forbid recording of conversations are made by those who routinely back out on their words.

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Thanks. I think you have fair points here. And i also don’t think that the possibility to use some thing for an illegal purpose should be forbidden or disabled, and i didn’t mean that. What i am saying is that it is totally fine to not put resources behind this for a privacy focused company. I think your second point is much more subjective as a conversation is always an at least two person thing and is therefore not only a matter of your rights but also of the other person.

I personally think of a phone call much more like of a conversation and i definitely would feel uncomfortable if someone would record me secretly in a face to face conversation. Maybe this varies between regions, cultures or just social groups. But i’m pretty sure people in social environment feel pretty much the same. In contrast i could point out that any messenger or SMS or what ever written, even letters, are pretty much conceived as a thing which leaves a “record” and someone could show to some one else, therefore it is handled with another mind set, at least by me.

This is what i see controversial about this topic. And so not clear if this is an important thing a phone should be able to do. So let it implement some who think it is. With this and my impression of purism, my guess is that they won’t implement it but i’m also quiet sure they will not try to block other from implementing it.

My point was that this just seams totally fine for me, but the argument here seams to go in a direction which draws a picture that other platforms could do this natively and pureos should also. Where i personally think both are wrong.

Interestingly, I’ve heard that it seems to be a trend among young folks (can anybody confirm?) to send voice messages instead of calling and a real call is somehow a frightening thought. Despite the fact that a call is usually a more transient thing.
So those people would create a record on both sides by default.

I think we should accept that it undeniably is controversial and undeniably could be used in illegal ways (depending on country) but neither is at all a reason not to have the functionality.

I can understand the perspective that you might not speak freely if you know you are being recorded. As such being recorded is a negative thing. As long as you are informed that you are being recorded, you have the choice to terminate the call, or to continue the call but choose your words carefully, or to continue the call and speak freely.

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What rights are relevant? All that a private recording does is help the recording party remember what was said and possibly be usable in court. Obviously the other party does not have the right to make the recording person forget what they said and if they need to hide the conversation from court even though the other party wants to show it then it is probably they themselves who are stepping on other people’s rights.

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i for one believe it is a good thing if the ‘record-call’ button is available from day 1 on L5 ! maybe also put a pop-up or a short description of the POSSIBLE legal implications of using such power (when clicked on - coupled with a ‘are-you-sure?’)

Just to look at this from another perspective.

All of the cameras, voice recorders etc around the country now makes surveillance much more pervasive. I forget the guy’s name, but a conservative guy on a college campus was handing out literature, a liberal guy punched him, and what is one of the things the news and authorities wanted? Who was recording with their phone? What “surveillance” was taking place?

I am very uncomfortable with government and corporate surveillance (and surveillance capitalism). I think A LOT of the people interested in the Librem 5 are uncomfortable with this as well.

Isn’t recording people without their consent another form of surveillance?

I get tools are needed by whistleblowers. But it is still surveillance. It is still “creepy”.

Apple doesn’t include the functionality in iOS. If you want it with iOS, you have to download a 3rd-party app.

I don’t want Purism to include “creepy” features. It would feel weird if Purism was more creepy than Apple in this regard.

For those who really need call recording for whistleblower reasons, I’m sure there will be apps available.

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Let’s have an (optional) call record button on the call screen.

I can’t easily grab screenshots, because the iPhone isn’t mine, however when we tested all that the other person did was call me then on the screen in the bottom right was the universal record icon and when pressed it counted down 3.2.1. then started recording.

This is on the iPhone 8+ with the latest iOS for it.

If this is old enough that the feature has been removed from newer devices I apologise for the confusion there. I didn’t think the device was as old as it is (I thought it was an iPhone 10)

I’d be curious to know what law/regulation they think that is as all I could find was “The FCC has no rules regarding recording of telephone conversations by individuals, but some state laws prohibit this practice.” From https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/recording-telephone-conversations

Now I concede that’s not a guarantee there aren’t regulations relating to call recording but when I looked I couldn’t find any and this was the most relevant thing I could find. Perhaps they were trained incorrectly or miss-understood something and are sharing the miss-information? Granted I could also be sharing miss-information if what they said is in fact true and I just haven’t been exposed to that evidence yet.

Hey, thanks for the reply. I find it interesting to see and maybe i’m even totally wrong and this is implemented natively and disabled for specific regions.

And on android its also native without 3rd party apps?

So on the Android front I have to eat a bit of crow… My older device does just fine. someone else’s newer Galaxy S9 does not. I’ll have to look into that a bit more.

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I can say I had an app called “Call Recorder” from Play Store that could automatically record all calls.

Already the old Romans said “Verba volant, scripta manent” :-).

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I too am surprised at those who are concerned that this may violate “the law”. We all know that our communications may be eavesdropped on and/or recorded by others, that’s half the reason something like the L5 is needed. When I interact with any pretty much any organisation over the phone the call is recorded, I suspect my father’s phone was tapped due to his vocal anti-war political stance. We’re just trying to even the playing field here.

I would very much like this feature and I will implement it myself if I have to.

And for those of us not fluent in Latin … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verba_volant,_scripta_manent

“Words fly away, writing remains” was very much correct in old Rome - especially if the writing was hacked in stone. But how is it today ? With digital recording almost everywhere it is difficult to defend the right to have ones words (some times hasty spoken) forgotten. Already Agent Smart who was much before his time had problems with the device to prevent overhearing. We are now in a position where we probably must suspect that everything on the net (including phone calls) is recorded. I am trying to use coded transmissions whenever possible so that those recording have to spend time and money to decode.

(By the way: thousand years ago the Vikings used secret runes also - coding and decoding is a never ending story …)

What?..no…I don’t want that! :slight_smile: I’m just relaying what I was told at the time. I didn’t actually look further into it at the time, just got the takeaway that I needed that it came stock like that and that I’d have to go about getting what I needed another way. Anyhow, the point of sharing that knowledge was so that it be known if purism doesn’t have that lack of functionality stock in the Librem5, it’s not necessarily because they share the views that it should be that way.

Again though, I don’t even see why this is an issue. Like…why does this whole thread sound like we’re asking for a feature? It’s a FOSS phone, it’ll run debian. We should be asking (because we do have to ask for them to use their power to represent us) our MPs (or whatever the it is where you are…congressional member(?))to protect our right to tinker, erode patent laws and the resulting trolls to be somewhat reasonable, etc. etc. We don’t have to ask purism like they’re apple or something because tinkering will be done and they’ve made it clear that getting out of the way of their customers will be part of their built in customer service if so desired. when it compes to recording calls, even if I have to muddle together pyAudio (actually, that’s probably what they’re doing now: making sure all the hardware maps proper with common libraries (?)) with my shit code to “make it go” ; It’s going to happen.

HA HA, but hopefully this will be attempted first by someone here in the forums with more intellectual expectations/capacity than signing their own name correctly…on a good day! :wink:

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Anyways, there are dozens of things that are more important to me than recording calls. There are plenty of other things to test out.

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Is all good :slight_smile: I wonder if it can also be somewhat dependent on bespoke manufacturer setups, carrier where one gets the phone bloatware, etc. etc. too? I just wonder though because I doubt any thing like this is handled by the base stations and soon I’ll have direction of my handset. Isn’t it nice to know things like this won’t even be a concern soon :slight_smile:

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