Calltrunk

Calltrunk was acquired by Bettervoice in May 2015. BetterVoice integrates with your address book just as Calltrunk did. Their outbound calling system uses your phone's outbound line, which is a more natural experience than Calltrunk's dial-back according to the letter sent to all CallTrunk users prior to the acquisition. On 8 May 2015 Calltrunk was completely shut down.

Legalities

Calltrunk maintains that when recording conversations for private purposes - as long as that recording is not shared with a third party - only one person needs to be aware of, and consent to, the recording.

Anthony Lee, data protection and privacy expert at law firm Bircham Dyson Bell, agrees, but only up to a point. "This does not apply if you want to use a third party, such as a cloud service-provider, to store recordings, particularly if sensitive personal data is involved, or if the recording is to be stored on servers which are located outside of the European Economic Area," he says. "The informed consent and, sometimes, the explicit consent of the individual or individuals concerned, will typically be required. It will be interesting to see the practice which emerges here."

Calltrunk disagrees and believes the law is analogous to that covering email, which, technically speaking, requires the consent of the sender before you can forward it. Practically no-one does this.

About recording people secretly, the system provides automatic beeping to signal recording is in progress. There is also an automatic announcement that a user can switch off if they prefer to tell the counter party themselves. These are customisable which reflects that requirements change from country to country and state to state.

Calltrunk co-founder Angela Clarke said federal law only requires single-party consent for recorded calls, though some states require all-party consent. Representatives from Calltrunk and Uppidy said they leave it up to users to notify people if they are being recorded.

The law differs considerably from country to country. In the UK, Canada, and some states in the US, this so-called 'one party consent' is adequate (but businesses in the UK must tell people that calls are being recorded). In 15 states of the US, however, all parties involved need to have consented. This is also the case in Australia.