Ok so i’ve searched the forums and found two times that this has been asked.
June 2013
Tony Lewis says No.
Ok maybe not but come on this can’t be that hard.
I have a site that wants to record all incoming calls great just set the call recording at the Queue as the call enters yup. But wait they take customer payment info??? I need to stop recording for that data. Now i just have the users hitting a “record” button that does the star code and stops recording then press it again when they resume recording.
But what do i wish for you might ask.
May 2016
Someone has more information but is it correct?
I want a lighted button to check the call status recording or not and light and then blf to toggle status. not recording off or green or whatever color you have on your buttons.
PLEASE tell me it is possible. PLEASE tell me what i can do to accomplish this. If i can make a custom context to associate with it and then how do i trigger a BLF on this?
I know its more of an asterisk questions but i was hoping someone in the mass of FreePBX users has had this and could point to more then just here is an asterisk book, asterisk’s website and the freepbx.
Agreed this is not an everyone has this problem but again I was hoping someone dealt with customer payments ever and had the morality question of should this be recorded and answered it with no.
I was asked to provide expert testimony in Iowa once, and during prep for that I found that “ad hoc” measures (like turning recording on or doing selective logs) are not admissible. The logs and recordings have to be collected as a “normal part of business”.
So, in addition to the “disconnected” nature of the recording process and the hint that is supposed to monitor it, you have the issue that some jurisdictions limit what can and can’t be used even if you record it. The fact that the hint is unrelated to the recording process doesn’t help you. Also, the fact that’s only a hint and the phone may or may not always reflect the hint makes this an inherently challenging and unreliable system.
Now, you could modify the “check for recording” context to set or clear a hint, but once again, that still wouldn’t be guaranteed to always catch the hint. There are just too many places that need to work with the system recordings.
the alternative is to use an external recording system that is housed in a secure area and has secure access to the recordings. this will pass muster with the credit card companies and will provide acceptable evidence in court. i guess you could do the same with the pbx, provided that it is in a secure area and you limit who has access to the recordings.
Right now I lock down recordings to an different mounted disk to the VM. Only people who have access have the asterisk user account and root. SSH is limited to only the management network. And access logs are monitored and alerted daily. I just want to be able notify the phone that the call is being recorded and then utilize that button to turn recording off and back on again.
You can certainly try, but it’s not going to be simple. There are no “flags” in the system that tell you if a call is being recorded, the status of “recording” gets checked once at the beginning of the call.
Like I said earlier, you can certainly dig into the Asterisk recording subsystem and play around with this, but there’s nothing that I’m aware of in the system that will make this easy for you. I doubt it’s even going to be something you will be able to do with custom contexts. I think you are going to be digging around in the guts of Asterisk to expose something that will lend itself to a hint.