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Audacity Faces Scrutiny After New Owners Publish a Privacy Policy Allowing Data Collection

posted by martyb on Tuesday July 06 2021, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the product-name-fits? dept.

takyon writes:

Audacity facing scrutiny after new privacy policy allows data collection, makes app 13+

Muse Group (the owners of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar) recently acquired Audacity in early May. On July 2nd, a new privacy policy for the app was posted to the app's website. Audacity did not previously have any sort of privacy policy in place for the app on their website, so there is no prior archived version of this page before its original publishing on July 2nd.

Much of this new privacy policy is harmless and, realistically, only exists for protecting the interests of Muse Group in any instance of legal trouble. However, users are frustrated over some of the choices made in this document.

Notably, the privacy policy includes the following: "The App we provide is not intended for individuals below the age of 13. If you are under 13 years old, please do not use the App." [...] In addition to the concerns raised by educators, the privacy policy seems to imply that if contacted by law enforcement, there is no limitation on what data they may collect.

See also: Audacity has been acquired by Muse Group, which also owns MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar (May 4)
Audio editor Audacity has the audacity to add telemetry collection -- and users are not happy (May 8)
Telemetry Debate Rocks Audacity Community In Open Source Dustup (May 17)
Audacity reverses course on plans to add opt-in telemetry after outcry (May 17)
Audio editor Audacity denies spyware accusations (June 6)

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 07 2021, @04:50AM (6 children)

    by Fnord666 (652) on Wednesday July 07 2021, @04:50AM (#1153584) Homepage
    No, open source Audacity audio editor is not “spyware” [arstechnica.com]

    Over the fourth of July weekend, several open source news outlets began warning readers that the popular open source audio editing app Audacity is now "spyware."

    This would be very alarming if true—there aren't any obvious successors or alternatives which meet the same use cases. Audacity is free and open source, relatively easy to use, cross platform, and ideally suited for simple "prosumer" tasks like editing raw audio into finished podcasts.

    However, the negativity seems to be both massively overblown and quite late. While the team has announced that Audacity will begin collecting telemetry, it's neither overly broad in scope nor aggressive in how it acquires the data—and the majority of the real concerns were addressed two months ago, to the apparent satisfaction of the actual Audacity community.

    [...] The May 7 update states that "telemetry is strictly optional and disabled by default" (emphasis crsib's), that telemetry only works in builds made by GitHub CI from the official repository, and that anyone compiling Audacity from source will be given a CMake option to enable the telemetry code—but that the option, and therefore building the telemetry functions, would be off by default.

    This three-days-later update to a still-provisional telemetry policy removed the only reasonable sticking point: whether users' data might be collected without their specific approval. Not only is the data collection opt-in, the functions used to collect that data in the first place are extremely easy to remove, are designed to be easy to remove, and are in fact removed automatically for anyone building the source code themselves (which would include Linux distribution repositories).

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @05:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @05:43AM (#1153594)

    This whole article is weird, trying to argue against this weekend's problem with the previous problem's various outcomes from several weeks ago.

    This weekend, there are problematic things with the privacy policy, and everyone claiming it's not a problem is arguing for/against the previous case with telemetry.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @02:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @02:27PM (#1153698)

    For now...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @09:34PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @09:34PM (#1153832)

    Where is the option to get the version with no telemetry? If there is no such thing, then telemetry is not optional.

    • (Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Thursday July 08 2021, @12:20AM (2 children)

      by Fnord666 (652) on Thursday July 08 2021, @12:20AM (#1153866) Homepage

      Where is the option to get the version with no telemetry? If there is no such thing, then telemetry is not optional.

      [...] The May 7 update states that "telemetry is strictly optional and disabled by default" (emphasis crsib's), that telemetry only works in builds made by GitHub CI from the official repository, and that anyone compiling Audacity from source will be given a CMake option to enable the telemetry code—but that the option, and therefore building the telemetry functions, would be off by default.

      Unless I'm misinterpreting this statement, it sounds like if you build from source the telemetry functionality will not be compiled in at all.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DeVilla on Friday July 09 2021, @06:19AM (1 child)

        by DeVilla (5354) on Friday July 09 2021, @06:19AM (#1154209)

        But if some windows user just downloads it from the official website, they get the voyeur enhanced version. Now I can't recommend friends download it any more. They aren't going to have a toolchain installed much less know how to use it.

        • (Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Saturday July 10 2021, @03:24PM

          by Fnord666 (652) on Saturday July 10 2021, @03:24PM (#1154614) Homepage

          But if some windows user just downloads it from the official website, they get the voyeur enhanced version. Now I can't recommend friends download it any more. They aren't going to have a toolchain installed much less know how to use it.

          This is true. My hope would be that someone would do a voyeur free build and make it available for download. Hard to know who to trust though i guess when you're downloading binaries.