Florida's two-party consent rule, and the lawsuit risk most businesses miss
Recording a call without the consent of everyone on it is a $1,000 minimum per interception in Florida. Most businesses do not realize they are inside the statute.
Florida is a two-party consent state, which is the kind of statutory fact that sounds technical until a plaintiff’s lawyer finds it. The Florida Security of Communications Act, codified at Chapter 934 of the Florida Statutes, makes it both a crime and a civil tort to intercept a wire, oral, or electronic communication without the consent of all parties to it. The civil remedy under Section 934.10 gives the plaintiff a minimum of $1,000 in liquidated damages per interception, plus actual damages if they can prove them, plus attorney’s fees. Each separate recording is its own violation.
The reason this matters more in 2026 than it did five years ago is that the surface area of what counts as “interception” has grown to cover business practices that nobody used to think of as wiretapping.
Three patterns generate most of the cases.
The first is recorded customer calls without proper disclosure. A Florida customer service operation that records calls for “quality assurance” needs the consent of the customer on the other end. The standard practice (a one-line disclosure played at the start of the call, then a continued conversation) is generally interpreted as implied consent to recording. The problem cases are the ones where the disclosure is missing, where it plays only after the recording starts, where it appears only in IVR menus the customer skipped, or where outbound sales calls go out without any disclosure at all. Each call without compliant disclosure is a $1,000 floor, and a class of similarly-situated Florida customers turns that into a number that focuses the mind.
The second is session replay and chatbot recording on websites. Florida courts have been receptive to the argument that website session replay tools (the ones that record every mouse movement, keystroke, and form interaction by visitors) constitute interception of an electronic communication between the user and the website. Some of the strongest plaintiff-side rulings nationally have come out of Florida district courts under the FSCA. Companies whose websites use session replay or chat recording from vendors like FullStory, Hotjar, or LivePerson without explicit consent are a class of cases that has been live for two years and shows no sign of slowing down.
The third is drone surveillance under the Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act, codified at Section 934.50. Drones used for security monitoring, property inspection, or marketing footage need consent or specific statutory authorization. Businesses that fly drones over neighboring properties (and the neighbors who notice) have a private right of action that is straightforward to plead.
The jurisdictional reach makes this a problem even for companies that do not think of themselves as operating in Florida. Section 48.193 extends Florida personal jurisdiction to anyone committing a tort in the state, which includes intercepting a communication with a Florida resident. A SaaS company in California with a website that records sessions for Florida visitors is inside the statute, regardless of where the company’s servers are.
The practical compliance posture is unglamorous. Map every place in your business where communications are recorded, captured, or replayed. That includes outbound and inbound calls, video meetings, chat transcripts, website session replay, marketing analytics that capture form inputs before submission, and drone footage. For each of those, confirm that the consent flow is explicit, clearly worded, and captured before the recording starts. Build the disclosure into the workflow rather than relying on a notice in the privacy policy that nobody reads. If you use third-party recording vendors, make sure their default configurations match Florida’s standard rather than the laxer rules from one-party consent states.
A Florida lawsuit under the FSCA is the kind of case plaintiff firms file in batches because the math works in their favor at every step. The cheap version of compliance, done before the demand letter, is much less expensive than the version done after.