NTT DoCoMo and Texas Instruments are working on a new, and potentially scary new feature for cellphones: the ability to record calls at the press of a button. When you think about it, there’s no technical reason why many of the new smartphones shouldn’t be able to do this, and for plenty of people it’d be useful to have a record of their phone conversations to refer to later. And in fact Nokia and Motorola have a feature called “voice notes” in some of their phones which lets you record a few seconds of a conversation.
But before this becomes a big overblown issue, a la the recent hysteria over cameraphones being used to take pictures in private areas, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s always been incredibly easy to record calls made with a landline, and that it’s just as legal or illegal to tape record a phone conversation without the other party’s consent using a cellphone as it is with a regular phone. So even if every cellphone in two or three years has a call-recording feature built-in, it shouldn’t really change a thing.
