At least pre-Covid, I presume that the general contract for professors does not include an agreement to be recorded, their job duties include giving lectures to

At least pre-Covid, I presume that the general contract for professors does not include an agreement to be recorded, their job duties include giving lectures to students but not (without specific amendments) preparing recordings for public distribution. IMHO it might be the case that if a particular professor really wants to, they can refuse to be recorded (or refuse to allow arbitrary redistribution of the record beyond the students to which the lecture was given) without any legal ability for the university to push them to agree to that - while in this site most of GDPR discussion refers to its application for websites, in reality most of GDPR enforcement has been in the non-web world and especially for the employer-employee relations, including things like surveillance cameras in workspaces and the validity of nonnegotiated clauses in employment contracts regarding employee privacy rights; so the employer pushing a contract change "agree to be recorded or stop working for us" might not be legal. The specific details matter, of course. Some examples of actual GDPR enforcement cases for mishandling of employee information: https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-enforcement/german-laptop-retailer-fined-127m-under-gdpr-for-employee-surveillance/29911.article https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-enforcement/german... - general video surveillance of employees; https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/hm-fined-352m-for-gdpr-violations/ https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/hm-fined-352m-for... - one of the biggest GDPR fines, for tracking various (IMHO clearly unreasonable) private data of employees; https://dataprivacymanager.net/725000e-gdpr-fine-by-dutch-dpa-for-collecting-employees-fingerprints/ https://dataprivacymanager.net/725000e-gdpr-fine-by-dutch-dp... - collecting employee fingerprints in an inappropriate manner. https://inplp.com/latest-news/article/EUR-150000-gdpr-fine-imposed-on-pwc-by-greek-data-protection-authority-for-being-not-accountable/ https://inplp.com/latest-news/article/EUR-150000-gdpr-fine-i... - employer asserting that a "consent" form that they forced all employees to sign counts as actual consent. I'm not saying that this necessarily prevents recording of lectures, but it also doesn't seem to be the case that you can "just do it" without properly accessing the legal aspect.