Recording conversations with OCS

I remember a while ago a number of people querying whether they were allowed to record a conversation with Orange OCS staff to later back up a claim that they had been badly treated.

There was some discussion about whether you had to state "I'm recording this conversation" or not, which to my mind was never cleared up.... but I just stumbled across this on the BBC site (which I would rate as pretty reputable):

Quote

The recording and monitoring of telephone calls is governed by a number of different pieces of UK legislation, according to Ofcom, the telephone industry regulator.

It is not illegal for individuals to tape conversations providing the recording is for their own use, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA).

It is a civil, not criminal, matter if a conversation or e-mail has been recorded and shared unlawfully.

If a person intends to make the conversation available to a third party, they must first obtain the consent of the person being recorded.

I dont know if that answers anything, because potentially you still need the OCS persons permission to give the recording to anyone else at Orange, but given that they will never give their full names I can't see how you could do that.

Anyway, it caught my eye that's all really.

I guess the real question is why do we do business with a network that you think you might have to record their calls to avoid getting stiffed.

It seems we're reminded many times that "calls are recorded for training and quality purposes" - you just try to obtain / refer to / find any information at all relating to a specific conversation and you'll be told it doesn't exist / servers are offline / been deleted etc, etc.

Personally, I often ask directly "Are you recording this conversation?" and when they invariably say "No", I tell them "Well I am!". You'd probably see quite a change in their attitude quite promptly.

And stuff the legallities. That's for someone else to worry about, I just want to be treated politely and fairly. Plus I can't see me ever needing to produce it in Court so I shouldn't need to prove whether it was obtained legally, or not