The Recording Law Your Phone Isn’t Ready For

On the morning of August 26 I added two words to the opening line of a phone assistant I built and run for small Israeli businesses, Onimli. It picks up the calls they miss, asks who is calling and why, and sends the owner a summary. Its greeting is one short sentence, and from that morning the sentence ends with roshemet u-ma’avira: “taking notes and passing them on.”

I made the change after reading the Privacy Protection Authority’s guidance on the duty to inform, which says, in a sentence I had managed not to notice for months, that the duty applies even when the person on the line called you. I had been telling myself what every Israeli business tells itself: they phoned us, so they know. The law disagrees, and it does not care whether the thing writing down their words is a receptionist or a model.

That was a small correction. The one arriving on March 22, 2027 is not, and most of the people it will hit have read a headline about it and nothing else.

Amendment 73, which is actually 74

Most of the coverage calls it Amendment 73 to the Consumer Protection Law, the number it carried through the Knesset. The text printed in Sefer HaChukim 3569 on July 22 is titled Amendment 74. The Knesset passed it on July 17, at the end of a session that began on July 13, and it takes effect eight months after publication. The Minister of Economy may push that back, with the Economics Committee’s approval, by no more than four months in total. So March 22, 2027, or July at the latest.

The new section 16D says this. In a covered transaction worth 750 shekels or more, a business must record every voice call with the consumer that happens without the two of them in the same room. Incoming calls count as much as outgoing ones. At the start of every such call the business must announce that it is recording and that the customer may ask for a copy. If a deal is closed, the recording is kept for at least two years; if it is not, for at least six months. When the customer asks, the business hands over the recording and a written list of call dates within ten business days, free of charge.

The threshold is broader than it sounds. Follow-on purchases made because of the sales pitch are added to the sum. For an open-ended contract it is the annual total; for a fixed-term contract, the whole term. And a transaction whose price is not yet known during the call is treated as one worth 750 shekels or more. In other words, the enquiry call counts, not just the call where money changes hands.

The part that changes the economics

The fine is the part everyone quotes. According to Ynet’s report on the vote, it is 14,750 shekels for an individual and 26,500 for a company, per breach. The fine matters less than a rule of evidence a few lines further down. If a customer asks for the recording and the business cannot produce it, the business is deemed, in any civil proceeding, to have admitted the customer’s version of what was said, or that the call took place at all. A court may let the business argue otherwise if there was a reasonable excuse, including that the call never happened. But the burden has flipped. And a business that did not hand over the recording when asked may not later submit it, or a transcript of it, as evidence without the court’s permission.

Every small business knows the “he said, she said” call: the discount that was “promised,” the renewal that was “never agreed.” From March, in the covered sectors, the version that wins by default is the one that does not have to prove anything.

The legislators, Iman Khatib-Yasin, Meirav Cohen and David Bitan, were not aiming at the shutter repairman. The figure presented when the law passed, again as reported by Ynet, was more than half a billion shekels a year lost to phone-sales abuse, falling hardest on people over 65. The list of covered businesses in the new Ninth Schedule reads like a map of that damage: sales of goods (not food) that involve a marketing pitch, except when the customer asked to be called back; loan brokerage; finding lost funds; checking medical-condition entitlements; tax-refund checks by anyone without an accountant’s or tax adviser’s licence; telephone, internet, broadcast and content services, including the equipment sold with them; credit-repair services by unlicensed operators; ongoing repair-and-maintenance service contracts; ongoing medical-service contracts, except public nursing care; and gas supply. Parallel amendments pull in banks, insurers and their agents, regulated financial-service providers and pension advisers.

If your business is not on that list, the recording duty does not reach you on March 22. Read the schedule, not the brochure of whoever is selling you a compliant phone system. But read the last clause of section 16D too: the minister may, with the committee’s approval, extend all of it to conversations that are not voice calls at all, “including an exchange of written messages.” That is a WhatsApp clause with the name left off.

What Israelis actually do on the phone

Here is what I can measure, because I run the machine that answers. In the last thirty days, from August 23 to today, my assistant took 810 calls for nine small businesses. The median call lasted fourteen seconds. Sixty-five percent were under half a minute. Twenty of the 810 ran two minutes or more; the longest was three minutes and fifty-four seconds; not one reached five. A hundred and two were flagged by the assistant as marketing or spam calls, which is its own comment on where the law came from.

Nobody is closing a 750-shekel deal in fourteen seconds. For most Israeli small businesses the phone is a dispatch tool, not a sales floor: where are you, when can you come, roughly how much. The law was written for the other kind of call, the long one that ends with a credit-card number and a pensioner who is not sure what she bought.

Yet the drafting does not distinguish between a closing call and an enquiry, and it explicitly covers calls handled by “another on the business’s behalf.” A maintenance-contract company on the schedule that lets an answering service, human or otherwise, take its enquiry calls has made every one of those calls a covered call.

My own product is not ready for this law. By design. Its privacy policy, updated on September 15, says the audio is kept for seven days and then deleted, and the transcript with it; the owner can switch audio retention off entirely, at which point the greeting changes to “taking notes” instead of “recording.” I built it that way because a caller’s voice is personal data, a lesson I relearned last week when I put three anonymised real calls on the product’s website as a demo and removed them the same day. Seven days is the right answer for a missed-call assistant. It is the wrong answer for a covered sales line, by roughly 723 days. If a client on the schedule wanted to route sales enquiries through it, the retention setting would have to become a contract term, not a privacy default.

That is the question landing this month on small Israeli automation studios such as Achiya Automation, mine among them: not “can you record,” but “can you find the call from last March in ten business days, prove it is complete, and hand it over without three other customers’ calls attached.”

Four things to do before March

First, decide whether you are on the list, using the text. The schedule is one page long. If you sell an ongoing service contract by phone, or goods with a pitch, you probably are.

Second, start the announcement now, whether or not you are covered. The privacy law’s duty to inform already applies to any recording or transcription of a caller, inbound included. One short sentence at the top of the call costs nothing and ends the argument.

Third, treat retention as a retrieval problem, not a storage problem. Two years of audio is cheap. Two years of audio you can locate by customer and date, on a deadline, with a written list of call times, is a filing system most small businesses do not have.

Fourth, ask whoever answers your phone, person or software, what happens to the words. Where the transcript lives, who can read it, when it is deleted. “I’m not sure” is the gap the law was written to expose.

If you sell by phone in Israel, here is my question: if a customer emailed you tomorrow asking for the recording of a call from last month, could you produce it within ten business days, and would you know, before you looked, whether the law says you have to?