Food for thought ! The walls do have ears !
You get on board your flight with your F/O, 45 minutes prior to pusback, the amount of ensuing chatter, work-gossip, expletives (trying to find a dropped pen, books and charts), general day to day cockpit preflight dramas all being recorded from all and sundry coming into the flight deck, then follows the briefing , short-long, standard, non-standard or otherwise, then 3 minutes into the taxy, you ‘dent’ their aircraft, by having some set of stairs being incorrectly parked, that you couldn’t see, hit the wing tip…… its an incident! As with all companies, an incident usually means pulling of CVR and more than likely DFDR/QAR tapes = FOQA… this whole period was just under an hour or so of cockpit activity, yet digital CVR recorded the last 2 hours, now the company will have the benefit of listening to the previous in-bound crew’s chatter during Final Approach and taxying in, let alone the current crew’s own situation!
Likewise, you’ve landed, taxied in, good ship all went well, walk off to crew room to sign off, get into car and a buddy calls you, that the aircraft was involved in a bingle or drama of some sort!!!! Company will pull CVR, and have a good insight into your last half hour of cruise flying and half hour of descent and approach!!!
Even worse scenario, you land walk away from a good flight, guy at bottom of stairs with tool box, says he’s here to shut down aircraft and pull CVR for “flight Operations purposes”… they now have 2 hours of all of your chatter, thoughts about various folk in the office and the way they do things to pilots etc…
Is the CVR used as a proper safety tool or as we’ve been seeing over the years, a weapon ?
If no incident, prior to each push back and after each landing, set park Brake, push the CVR button! You’ll feel a bit better next time the guy comes up the stairs with his tool box!