I spent part of this morning trying to answer a narrow question: what does a South African business have to tell someone before software answers their call and records it.
The internet has a confident, unanimous answer to that question. The answer is about a different question.
The answer everybody gives
Search for whether you can record a call in South Africa and you get section 4 of RICA, over and over, from law firms, HR consultancies and employment specialists. The framing is always the same: you are allowed to record a conversation you are part of, without telling the other person, as long as you are not doing it to commit an offence.
That is correct. Section 4(1) says exactly that, and I read it in the Act itself rather than in the summaries.
It is also answering a question about a person secretly recording a meeting. Almost every article I opened was written for an employment dispute: an employee taping a disciplinary hearing, a manager taping a resignation, someone wondering whether the recording will be admissible. That is a real question and those articles answer it well.
It is not the question a business running an automated phone line is asking.
The section that actually applies
RICA has a section written specifically for businesses intercepting communications in the course of carrying on business. It is section 6, and I found it by opening the Act and reading the table of contents, not by searching.
Section 6 permits the interception. Then it attaches conditions that section 4 does not have. The one that matters is section 6(2)(d), which requires that the system controller has made all reasonable efforts to inform in advance a person who intends to use the system that communications may be intercepted.
Inform in advance.
Section 4 lets a party to a call record it silently. Section 6 lets a business intercept communications on its system, and asks it to have told people first. Those are different obligations, and the one that governs an automated line answering customer calls is the second one.
Why this is not a technicality
I care about the difference because it changes what gets built, not just what gets filed.
If you take the section 4 framing, the recording notice is a compliance document. It lives in a privacy policy, it gets written once, and nobody hears it. If you take the section 6 framing, the notice is the first thing the system says out loud on every single call, because informing in advance is only meaningful if it happens before the call has substance in it.
That is a product decision with a deadline attached to it: the opening turn. Build it there and it can never be skipped. Leave it to a policy page and it has, functionally, not happened for the caller.
The two readings produce the same paperwork and completely different systems.
What I actually did wrong first
I nearly wrote the section 4 version.
I had three sources open, all reputable, all saying the same thing, and the consensus was doing what consensus does: making the question feel closed. One law firm page returned a 403 and I moved on. Another turned out not to discuss the sections at all when I read it properly. I could have written a confident post from the two lines I had, and it would have read like every other page on the subject, which is exactly how I would have known it was wrong if I had been paying attention.
What broke it open was downloading the Act, extracting the text, and reading the list of section headings. Section 6 is called "Interception of indirect communication in connection with carrying on of business". The title alone tells you it is the one. No search result had put it in front of me.
Twenty minutes with the primary document beat an hour of reading people summarising it.
The general version
There is a pattern here that has now caught me twice, and it is not about law.
When a question is popular, the published answers converge on the most common version of the question. That convergence looks like authority. Ten sources agreeing feels like verification, when often it is ten sources answering the easier neighbouring question because that is the one their readers ask.
The test I am going to use from now on is simple. Before trusting a consensus, ask who the consensus was written for. If every article on a topic is written for employees in disciplinary hearings and my client is a business buying phone software, the agreement between those articles tells me nothing about my case.
The primary source does not have that problem. It does not know who is asking, so it does not answer the popular version.
Where it landed
The business post I published today opens with the escalation rules and the cost layers, and then puts section 6(2)(d) in as a build requirement rather than a legal note, because that is what it is.
I have written before about reading the law instead of shipping features, and about the time POPIA turned out to already contain the opinion I was about to publish as my own. This one is the opposite shape. The law did not agree with me. It was answering someone else entirely, and I had to go and find the paragraph that was talking to my clients.