Companies That Record You Should Have To Send You The Recording

Here's my public policy proposal: when you have a phonecall (or videocall) with a company, and they make a recording, they should be legally obliged to share that recording with you.

There are too many times now where I've called (say) an airline or cellphone company, they've told me something specific, that something turned out to be false or misleading, but I have no provable record to point to.

If they had written the same thing in an email I would have some leg to stand on in trying them to do the right thing based on their information they themselves gave me – yes I still probably wouldn't have been able to do anything about it, but at least it would be slightly easier to say "here is what you said, why did you tell me that?"

Sometimes (when you have previously called a company) the company is willing to listen back to the recording on their side, but they won't let you listen to it too. So they can just say "we listened to the recording and decided to take no action," which sucks real bad.

I think the future is going to be even worse in terms of bad information from company phonecalls once the entity on the other side of a phonecall is an AI, and if companies aren't forced to be legally responsible for the things their AIs say. So long as the proof of what was said on a call is only available to the company and not the customer, there is ~0 chance of the companies staying responsible.

I know that unfortunately this proposal might not be possible with e.g. banks and hospitals, who 1) really do have a ton of regulation about securing the privacy of your data, and 2) also screw their customers around a lot.

Alas: something is better than nothing, and every company who can share a recording should be forced to do it.