[GTALUG] [ Audacity Becomes Spyware (fwd)

[David Collier-Brown]

That was a pre-announcement, which they withdrew.

--dave

On 2021-07-05 10:10 p.m., Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
> 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.
>>
>
-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain