[GTALUG] [ Audacity Becomes Spyware (fwd)

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2021-07-06 7:10 a.m., David Collier-Brown via talk wrote:
> That was a pre-announcement, which they withdrew.

They said they were going to withdraw, but they doubled down:
https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/

Their new terms and conditions includes:

* collection of usage data (including OS version, user country (based on
IP address; it's not clear if they retain IP address), CPU, non-fatal
error codes, crash reports and data necessary for law enforcement,
litigation and authorities’ requests) stored and processed in Russia;

* no use by those under 13 (since presumably the above data collection
has no way to opt out, so can't be in compliance with any minor
protection laws)

Both are a bit worrying, but I've seen Audacity used by middle school
science and music classes. This will likely have to stop and another app
found.

Audacity is GPL 2. It could be forked. Muse, the new owners (again,
something I'm not clear on), have a habit of monetizing the apps they
are involved with. MuseScore, while a rather decent music engraving
system, has now become a nagware pain since Muse bought it. It does work
if you're not "signed in" to Muse, but there are some features that are
locked out unless you're logged in, and the best of their scores library
(mostly community contributed or public domain) is a payware feature.

cheers,
 Stewart