Tools and tips used to tape conversations

The genie of mobile technology is out of the bottle and with it comes perils and profits.

In recent days, incidents of call recordings involving newsmakers have rippled social media waters. Some of the recordings carry sensitive and confidential information.

For example, in the ongoing fake gold fiasco, an audio recording of what is believed to be a recorded conversation between a prominent Kenyan politician and a gold dealer has emerged.

The recording has become a subject of dissection and discussion in both social and mainstream media, and has raised questions on how such recordings are made so stealthily and shared so widely.

Whereas we are not privy to how that fake gold call was recorded, there are a suite of tools which can be used to secretly record calls between two people.

PRIVACY

Having a recording of a phone call is not uncommon in professions such as business, sales, journalism, law, customer service or anyone else who uses their phone for professional purposes.

Call recordings can be used for a variety of benign reasons, including training for customer services staff or any time one would prefer to focus on the phone call instead of jotting down contemporaneous notes.

Students can also record lectures in class and listen to them later. Recording a call with someone when they are unaware, however, borders on encroaching their privacy and may be contested in a court of law.

Although in Kenya there are no specific laws against covert call recording, best practice around the world require that, unless for the purposes of collecting evidence for legal reasons, the caller should inform the receiver that they are being recorded so that they can decide whether to be on or off the record.

APPLICATIONS

There is a suite of call recording apps for all types of smartphones.

There are voice recorder apps that when activated, keep a recording of all incoming and outgoing calls automatically.

When choosing a call recording app for personal use or for your business, a call recorder with an automatic recording option can ensure you don’t miss a recording.

Automatic Call Recorder is one of the most popular call recording apps. When installed on a phone, the app allows one to record any number of calls coming to or leaving a phone.

Call Recorder — ACR is another vaunted call recording app. It can track your incoming and outgoing calls and record them without you having to do anything.

CIRCUMSPECT

The app also supports multiple cloud storages including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive, places where you can store call records.

Determining whether your call is being recorded can be difficult, as modern digital recording techniques leave little trace which you can use to know if you are on tape.

Your only option is to measure your words while you speak with someone with a penchant for recording callers.

Sam Wambugu is an informatician. Email: [email protected] @samwambugu2