AI note-takers in a Queensland agency: what the recording rules say

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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A note-taking tool does three things that used to be separate. It records what was said, it turns the sound into a transcript, and it writes a summary with action items that can be filed, emailed or pushed into a customer database. In a real estate office that might be a listing presentation, a video meeting with a buyer interstate, a routine inspection, a sales meeting or a body corporate committee meeting.

No single Queensland law is written for these tools. Each of the three steps meets a different rule: recording falls under a state Act from 1971, the transcript and the summary are personal information under federal privacy law where the agency is covered, and what the summary says about a property or a promise sits under the same accuracy duties as any other agency record. This guide sets out what each rule says, by setting, and where the answer depends on the case. It is general information, not legal advice.

The tools come in a few types: a feature built into a video meeting platform, a recorder that joins a call as an extra participant, an app on a phone lying on the table, or a service that transcribes an audio file afterwards. In almost every case the audio leaves the device and is processed on the provider's servers, in Australia or overseas, under the provider's terms.

Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 (Qld), sections 43 to 45; Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Queensland's recording law: the party rule

The starting point is the Invasion of Privacy Act 1971. Section 43 makes it an offence to use a listening device to overhear, record, monitor or listen to a private conversation. The maximum penalty is 40 penalty units or two years' imprisonment. A listening device is defined widely enough to take in a phone or a laptop: any equipment capable of recording a private conversation while it takes place.

Section 43 then carves out the case that matters most to an agency. The offence does not apply where the person using the device is a party to the private conversation. In plain terms, Queensland's Act does not make it a crime for someone to record a conversation they are part of, even where the others do not know. It is a rule about a criminal offence only. It says nothing about privacy law, professional standards or what a client would think of it.

Two limits follow from the wording. The first is the definition of a private conversation: words spoken in circumstances indicating that the speakers want to be heard only by themselves, and not words spoken where a person ought reasonably to expect to be overheard or recorded. The second is the word "party". The exception protects the person in the conversation who uses the device. A tool left running in a room after the agent steps out, or sent to a video meeting its owner does not attend, sits outside that wording on its face. Whether a particular arrangement is covered is a question for legal advice.

A video meeting with people in other states adds another layer, because each state and territory has its own recording statute.

Passing the recording on: section 45

The part of the Act that note-takers run into more often is section 45. A person who was a party to a private conversation and recorded it with a listening device must not communicate or publish to anyone else the record, or a statement prepared from the record. The penalty is the same as for section 43: up to 40 penalty units or two years' imprisonment.

The phrase about a statement prepared from the record matters for automated summaries. A summary generated from the audio, then emailed to a colleague, a vendor's relative or a referral partner, is on its face the kind of document the section describes.

Section 45 has exceptions. The offence does not apply where the communication is made to another party to the conversation, or with the consent of all the other parties. It does not apply in the course of legal proceedings. It does not apply where the communication is no more than is reasonably necessary in the public interest, in the performance of a duty, or to protect the lawful interests of the person making it. And it does not apply where the recipient has a reasonable interest in the conversation. Section 44 separately bans communicating or publishing a conversation that was recorded unlawfully in the first place.

For calls carried over the phone network there is a federal layer as well. The Australian Law Reform Commission summarises the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 as making it an offence to intercept a communication passing over a telecommunications system without the knowledge of the person making it, subject to exceptions; the magazine's guide to AI voice agents on agency phones covers that ground in detail.

Privacy Act: when the transcript is personal information

A recording of a person's voice, a transcript with their name in it, and a summary of their finances or family plans are all personal information. Whether the Privacy Act 1988 applies to an agency depends first on size. The OAIC describes a small business as one with an annual turnover of $3 million or less, and such a business is generally exempt, unless it falls into one of the listed exceptions, which include trading in personal information, operating a residential tenancy database or being related to a larger covered business. Coverage is the subject of the magazine's earlier guide on privacy law and real estate.

For a covered agency, the OAIC's guidance on privacy and the use of commercially available AI products, published on 21 October 2024, is the closest thing to an instruction manual. It says privacy obligations apply both to personal information entered into an AI system and to the output the system produces, and that information an AI generates or infers about an identifiable person counts as a collection, and has to meet Australian Privacy Principle 3: reasonably necessary for the business's functions, and collected by lawful and fair means.

The guidance works through meeting assistants as an example: platforms can record meetings and use AI to generate transcripts or minutes. It says the organisation must check that what the tool captures is reasonably necessary, and that content which is not, such as personal chat or confidential client information, should be destroyed or de-identified. It also says that whether participants know about the recording and the transcript bears on whether the collection is lawful and fair. A recording can therefore be outside the 1971 offence and still be an unfair collection under the federal Act.

Purpose matters too. Principle 6 limits use of personal information to the purpose it was collected for, with exceptions. Recording a presentation to keep accurate notes of the vendor's instructions is one purpose. Feeding the same recording into sales coaching or the provider's model training is another, and the OAIC suggests seeking consent or offering a real opt-out where a secondary use is not clearly within what people would expect.

Sensitive details, offshore processing and retention

A meeting about selling a home wanders. A vendor may mention a diagnosis or a religious observance that affects open home times. Health information and several other categories are sensitive information under the Privacy Act, and the general rule is that collecting them needs consent. On meeting tools the OAIC is specific: because nobody can predict what a meeting will contain, seeking consent is best practice. It adds that consent to collect sensitive information "cannot be implied merely because an individual was notified", in the words of the guidance.

Where the provider processes or stores audio overseas, Principle 8 comes into play. According to the OAIC's guidelines, before disclosing personal information to an overseas recipient a business must take reasonable steps to ensure the recipient does not breach the principles, usually through an enforceable contract. Under section 16C of the Act, the Australian business remains accountable if the overseas recipient mishandles the information. Storage with an overseas cloud provider may be only a use, not a disclosure, where a binding contract limits the provider to storage, binds its subcontractors and leaves the business able to retrieve or delete the data. Separately, the OAIC recommends that organisations not enter personal information, and particularly sensitive information, into publicly available generative AI tools.

Security and retention come under Principle 11, which the OAIC summarises as a duty to take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, loss and unauthorised access, and to destroy or de-identify it in certain cases. Its selection checklist asks what security incidents the product has had, where it runs, and whether the developer has access to what is entered. A tool that keeps every recording indefinitely by default creates a store of client conversations that somebody has to secure, and eventually delete.

The statutory tort since June 2025

The newest layer does not depend on turnover. The statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy commenced on 10 June 2025 and sits in Schedule 2 of the Privacy Act. The OAIC notes that it reaches individuals and entities that may not be covered by the rest of the Act, so the small business exemption is no answer to it.

According to the OAIC, a person bringing a claim has to show they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in all the circumstances, that the defendant invaded their privacy either by intruding on their seclusion or by misusing information about them, and that the public interest in protecting their privacy outweighs any competing public interest. An article in Proctor, the Queensland Law Society's journal, adds that the invasion must be serious and must have been intentional or reckless, and that the plaintiff does not need to prove damage. Consent and lawful authority are defences. Courts can award damages, grant an injunction or order an apology; Proctor put the cap on damages for non-economic loss and punitive damages together at $478,550 when the tort began.

The OAIC states that an adult must start proceedings within the earlier of one year after becoming aware of the invasion or three years after it happened. How the courts will apply the tort to a recorded meeting is not settled, and nothing here predicts it. The OAIC does not administer the tort; claims go to court.

The older rules ask who pressed record. The newer ones ask what the people in the room were told.

When the summary is wrong

Transcription errors are ordinary: a figure misheard, two speakers merged into one. Summaries add a different kind of error. A generative system can attribute a statement to the wrong person, tidy a hesitant answer into a firm commitment, or include a point nobody made. The OAIC's guidance treats this as a privacy matter in its own right, noting that incorrect or artificially generated information about an identifiable person is still personal information, and that Principle 10 requires reasonable steps to make sure the information a business uses is accurate. Among the steps it suggests is human oversight.

To take an invented example, a summary recording that the vendor agreed to a price reduction, or that the agent confirmed a pool was certified, becomes part of the file. If it is sent to a buyer or relied on in later marketing, it is a representation. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's position on false or misleading claims is that any statement creating a false impression can break the law and that it makes no difference whether the business intended to mislead. The Office of Fair Trading's guidance on property advertising says licensed agents must not engage in misleading or deceptive conduct, and lists Australian Consumer Law penalties of up to $2.5 million per breach for an individual. The Real Estate Institute of Queensland has also pointed out that false or misleading representations can affect a person's ability to hold a licence or registration under the Property Occupations Act 2014.

Handwritten notes can be wrong too. The difference is that an automated summary looks finished, is produced in seconds, and is easy to forward unread, which is why the guidance keeps returning to human review.

Inspections and tenants

Queensland tenancy law says a good deal about entry and very little about recording. The Residential Tenancies Authority's entry and privacy fact sheet, in its May 2025 version, states that an owner or manager must take reasonable steps to ensure tenants have quiet enjoyment, meaning no interference with their reasonable peace, comfort and privacy. Routine inspections need seven days' written notice on the entry notice form and cannot happen more than once every three months unless the tenant agrees.

On images, the RTA's fact sheet on taking photos in a rental property, also dated May 2025, accepts that personal information collected during a tenancy may include photographs taken at inspections, provided it relates to managing the premises. It says those photos must be stored securely, seen only by relevant people and destroyed within the required timeframe, and it suggests telling the tenant in advance, for example in the entry notice. Using photos of a tenant's possessions in advertising needs the tenant's written permission.

The fact sheet deals with photographs only. It does not mention audio or video, and an earlier RTA article on the same subject says there are no specific guidelines about entry to take photos and that each situation is considered case by case. So a property manager who walks through a home dictating observations into a note-taker is working in a gap, filled by the general rules above. If the tenant is home and speaks, the conversation is recorded and the 1971 Act and privacy law apply as they would anywhere else. If nobody is home, the manager's own narration is not a conversation, though a video walk-through captures far more of someone's home than a few photos of a leaking tap. What the resulting report must contain is covered in the magazine's guide to AI-drafted condition reports.

Body corporate meetings

Minutes make body corporate managers and committee secretaries natural users of note-takers. The Queensland Government's body corporate guidance is short on the point. It states: "Audio or visual recording of meetings is not dealt with in the body corporate legislation." It then refers readers to the Invasion of Privacy Act for an individual's right to record a conversation they take part in.

The same guidance records what adjudicators have said about the result. A recording taken with the agreement of the meeting, and used to help prepare the minutes, is a body corporate record. Body corporate records can be inspected under the access rules, so an audio file kept on a manager's software account may have to be produced on request.

A 2021 article published by the Strata Community Association describes two adjudicator decisions on the subject. In one, from 2014, a recording of a committee meeting made by the strata manager for the manager's own purposes was treated as a body corporate record. In the other, from 2013, an adjudicator found that a committee could refuse to let anyone attending record its meeting. Adjudicators' orders turn on their facts, so these are indications, not rules.

Team meetings and staff

Recording a sales meeting raises the same party rule, plus the question of monitoring. Queensland has no dedicated workplace surveillance Act. A 2018 Queensland Government statement announcing a review noted that the Invasion of Privacy Act regulates listening devices but not optical, tracking or data surveillance devices. The Queensland Law Reform Commission was asked that year to review workplace surveillance; its page on the review says the work is currently on hold, and that the Commission's 2020 report on civil surveillance recommended legislative change.

At the federal level, the OAIC says the Privacy Act does not specifically cover surveillance in the workplace, though the privacy principles may apply where an employer keeps a record of monitoring that does not directly relate to the person's employment. It adds that monitoring of computer use would generally be allowed where staff have been told about it. A tool that scores each agent's talk time in recorded client meetings is closer to monitoring than to minute-taking.

Lawyers, conveyancing staff and privilege

Many property conversations include a solicitor or a conveyancing clerk, and some agencies sit alongside a conveyancing practice. For lawyers the stakes are different because of the duty of confidentiality and client legal privilege. The Queensland Law Society's Guidance Statement No 37 on artificial intelligence in legal practice, published on 31 May 2024, says practitioners should take reasonable steps to ensure an AI tool does not misuse confidential data. Where the user agreement does not address data use and model training, it says, "the tool should be avoided". It lists the possible impact on privilege as a risk to assess, and reminds practitioners that privilege is a shield against disclosure, not a means of restoring confidentiality once it is lost.

A July 2026 article in Proctor deals with note-taking tools directly. It observes that transcription tools capture everything said on a call, including privileged advice and confidential settlement figures. It advises treating the choice of tool as a confidentiality and privacy assessment and keeping a record of it, reading the binding user agreement over the marketing material, and confirming where data is stored and whether any processor trains on, retains or shares it.

When a client's solicitor joins a call, the agent's note-taker is recording the solicitor's advice to the client, and the solicitor may ask for it to be turned off. The broader rules for AI on a conveyancing file are in the magazine's guide on that subject.

What a notice to participants usually contains

Regulators do not publish a script, but the ingredients can be read from their guidance. Principle 5, as set out in the OAIC's guidelines, lists what a person should be told when their information is collected, at or before the time of collection where practicable. Put together for a note-taker, the usual content looks like this.

The OAIC's test for the notice is that it be clear and prominent to all attendees, which in a video meeting includes people who join late and in a home includes the family member who walks in halfway through. The guidance adds that an opt-out notice at the start of a meeting may be enough only where failing to opt out has no serious consequences. A notice also covers only what it describes: if the recording is later put to a new use, the purpose rules in Principle 6 apply afresh.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

About Kooky and Shaka →