[GTALUG] [ Audacity Becomes Spyware (fwd)

[Howard Gibson]

Karen,

    Well damn.

    I am using Audacity to record my vinyl LPs into MP3 files to play in my car.  Can they detect that?

On Mon, 5 Jul 2021 21:54:04 -0400 (EDT)
Karen Lewellen via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> Speaking personally as someone who  has used the program for field 
> production,  I am rather disappointed.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Audacity open source audio editor has become spyware
> 
> 
> https://www.slashgear.com/audacity-open-source-audio-editor-has-become-spyware-05681012/
> 
> 
> Ewdison Then
>    - Jul 5, 2021, 12:47am CDT
> 
> One of open source software’s biggest strengths is, naturally, its openness, 
> which brings other benefits like freedom of use, security through scrutiny, 
> flexibility, and more. That is mostly thanks to the open source-friendly 
> licenses these programs use, but, from time to time, someone comes along and 
> tries to make changes that infuriate the community of users and developers. 
> Sometimes, those changes can even be illegal. Such seems to be the fate that 
> has befallen Audacity, one of the open source world’s most popular pieces of 
> software that now comes under a very invasive privacy policy.
> 
> The brouhaha started just a few months ago when Audacity was bought by the Muse 
> Group, the company behind equally popular music software like MuseScore, which 
> is also open source, and Ultimate Guitar. So far, Audacity remains open source 
> (and can’t really be changed into proprietary software in its current form), 
> but that doesn’t mean that Muse Group can’t do some pretty damaging 
> changes. Those changes come in the form of the new privacy policy that was just 
> updated a few days ago, a policy that now allows it to collect user data.
> 
> As a desktop application with no core online functionality, Audacity never had 
> any need to “phone home” in the first place. Now the privacy policy says 
> that the new company does collect data and does so in a way that’s both 
> over-arching and vague, most likely by design. For example, it says that it 
> collects data necessary for law enforcement but doesn’t specify what kind of 
> data is collected.
> 
> There are also questions regarding the storage of data, which is located in 
> servers in the USA, Russia, and the European Economic Area. IP addresses, for
> example, are stored in an identifiable way for a day before being hashed and 
> then stored in servers for a year. The new policy also disallows people under 
> the age of 13 from using the software, which,  as FOSS Post points out, is a 
> violation of the GPL license that Audacity uses.
> 
> The open source community was understandably irked by these changes. 
> Fortunately, Audacity is open source software, and it will most likely be taken 
> by the community and forked in a different direction, perhaps with a different 
> name. That will leave Muse Group to develop Audacity on its own instead of 
> being able to leverage (and exploit) the open source community’s hard work.
> 


-- 
Howard Gibson 
hgibson at eol.ca
jhowardgibson at gmail.com
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson