This page is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Talk to a qualified professional about your situation.
Recorded meetings and calls capture what written records miss: how a decision was reached, how a sales call went, how a support agent talked a customer through a problem. Fewer buyers ask for them than for email or chat. Of the buyers we cover, Mode names “calls and transcripts” and lists Zoom among its sources, and Troveo shows Zoom with its chat tools. micro1, Mercor and Nyne do not name recordings on their pages.
Consent comes first
Recordings raise questions that text does not:
- Who agreed to be recorded, and for what. Recording-consent rules differ between US states and between countries, and people agreed to a recording for a meeting, not for licensing. What participants were told is the starting point.
- Customers and outside parties. External participants are covered by your privacy policy and any notice they heard, not by your employment terms.
- Voices and faces identify people. De-identifying audio and video is harder than removing names from text, so many companies license transcripts and leave the recordings out.
- Sensitive meetings: board, legal, HR and medical conversations stay out.
Our guides to privacy and de-identification and legal considerations cover the general rules. This is the data type where a lawyer’s review is most worth the time.
When Zoom deletes recordings
- Downgrading to a free plan: Zoom deletes cloud recordings 30 days after the account is downgraded.
- Deleting a user without transferring their data: that user’s cloud recordings are permanently deleted.
Download recordings or transfer them to another user before downgrading or removing accounts. Recordings made in Microsoft Teams and Google Meet are stored in the company’s Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace files, so they follow the deadlines on documents and files. The data retention clock dates the Zoom limits.
Before you apply
- Find out where recordings live: Zoom cloud, local drives, a sales call recorder, the phone system.
- Collect the consent wording used for each kind of recording.
- Ask buyers whether transcripts alone are enough.
What buyers say about meeting and call recordings
Questions people ask
Are transcripts easier to license than recordings?
Usually. A transcript can be de-identified like any other text, while a recording carries voices and faces, which are harder to anonymise. Mode names calls and transcripts together; ask each buyer which form it takes.
We record customer calls for quality purposes. Can we license them?
Only if what you told callers, your privacy policy and the recording-consent rules where your callers are allow it. A notice that calls are recorded for quality and training was usually written with your own staff training in mind. Ask your lawyer before including customer calls.
Sources
Other kinds of company data
Years of customer, vendor and internal threads. Export before you cancel Google Workspace or Microsoft 365: deleted mailboxes do not come back.
Team chat
Slack and Teams show how decisions were made. Free Slack plans delete history after a year, and only some plans export private channels.
Documents and files
SOPs, proposals, specs and wikis in Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, Notion or Confluence. Each vendor deletes on its own schedule.
Support tickets
Thousands of real problems and how your team solved them. They are full of customer details, so privacy promises decide what you can include.
CRM and sales records
Deals, accounts and the notes behind them. Valuable to AI buyers, and also to anyone buying your business, so decide which comes first.
Source code
Repositories, commits, pull requests and issues show how software is really built. Third-party code and client work need sorting out first.
Projects and tasks
Jira, Asana and Monday boards record who did what, when and why. Asana's export right after termination lasts only 30 days.