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Indisputable cellphone recordings

Cellphone recordings: invasive and unfair or a practical approach to protecting your rights?

Judge Nkola Motata's crash into a businessman's wall and the recordings taken of what transpired at the scene by the owner of the property, Richard Baird, on a cellular phone, has raised a number of questions around privacy and the admissibility of such evidence in legal disputes.

The reality? Recordings made on a personal communication device can provide a legally acceptable record of events and the technology that makes these recordings irrefutable is available to consumers.

PDAs and cellphones have become an integral part of our lives - a communication tool used for work and play. As such, these instruments can play a large role in protecting us from unscrupulous behaviour. Happily, the ability for the consumer to protect him/herself in this fashion is fast becoming a reality.

Any conversation you have on a telephone, whether a standard landline or mobile device, can be recorded and, subject to applicable legal principle and legislation, can be admitted as evidence in legal proceedings. There are, of course, a few key technical requirements if such recordings are to be considered an incontrovertibly true record of events.

Technology advances enable almost anyone to easily edit a recording of any kind. In contact centres and within enterprises where the recording of voice transactions has long been common practice, however, these issues have already been addressed.

Authentication of recordings is done by signing the recording file with a unique signature based on various parameters of the data captured. Date and time stamps are included, with the caller line ID and serial number of the phone also being recorded as a matter of course. In addition, speaker verification, which is in essence biometrics-based voice analysis, can identify a speaker as clearly as a fingerprint or iris scan through comparison of the recording with a sample of that person's voice.

The benefits of some of these technologies are now being extended to consumers.

Libra Mobile, a new application for the recording of mobile conversations, has just been released by Spescom DataVoice, a subsidiary of Spescom. Tailored for use by enterprises, the application records all conversations, authenticates and tamper-proofs them with an electronic signature. Recorded conversations are then safely stored on a central server within the enterprise. These recordings can then be seamlessly accessed along with all other calls recorded by the business. This information can be searched, played, exported and e-mailed.

Spescom's Libra Mobile solution also takes into consideration the fact that cellphones supplied to employees may be used for personal calls in complete confidentiality as, at the end of every conversation, a prompt can be given to either save or delete the recording.

Will consumers use such an application responsibly? The answer lies in general adoption. As voice recordings of cellphone conversations become the norm, we may begin to wonder how we ever did without them.

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