You ask them if the phone call is recorder. They say Yes. You, in a surprised voice, ask if they are ok with that? Done.

Honestly I always take "This call may be recorded" as two way consent :) one time someone was referring to person with hard to pronounce name and I said "that's fine I will play it back". Person responded: "wait, are you recording? I didn't give you my consent". To which I said yes you did, when I called your line answered with announcement that this call can be recorded. He wasn't too happy :)

It's a bit tricky, since "this call may be recorded" often is played only to you before connecting to the other person, so technically this announcement was not made to them.

Their line helpfully tells you in advance "this call may be recorded." Great! Looks like permission to me! Record I shall! If they object to the call's being recorded, they ought to take that up with whomever controls their phone lines.

If you're calling a corporation (or they called you) then it's the corporation that's the legal entity being recorded... Not the person on the other end of the phone.

People have separate rights even if they are employees, and wiretapping laws apply to recording people - like, the company recording their own calls can easily be a violation of wiretapping laws if they don't properly inform their employees.

There are 2 different ambiguities there:

1. Ambiguous may, which could refer to permission or to possibility

2. Doesn't specify which party is permitted to do the recording/might be doing the recording

Makes me wonder why that phraseology is so widespread. Why not use We might record this call?

Huh. I’ve bluffed that once when I was getting bad service because I thought it would get the agent to pay more attention. Can’t say it had the intended effect, but they did not hang up. I just got a “yessir”.

Check your local laws. In some places, if either party announces the call can be recorded than either party may record it. Ie if the Corp says the call is being recorded, you can record as well without being required to say anything. It is already assumed the call is being record.

Why would you need to tell them that you're recording the call? They already know that the call may be recorded.

Not necessarily. Imagine the following: my company doesn't record calls, but we say that we "may" record calls because we think it will convince callers to behave. My employees know that their call is not being recorded, and getting one party to consent to something we don't actually want to do is business as usual.

If this took place in a two-party consent state then your consent alone is not enough, you'd also need the caller's consent which my company doesn't have. If you were to record the call without letting the employee know beforehand, that recording would be illegal.

But the company has said that the call may be recorded.

(In case anyone is reading this, I push my calls through Telnyx, have inbound/outbound recording on, and just caught PayPal removing the 2FA from my account, after I begged them not to, and then stalling me on the phone and transferring me to a manager after their call centers closed.

Gonna be a fun call with PayPal tomorrow!)