meeedeee
Audacity Is Now A Possible Spyware, Remove It ASAP
PSA: If you use Audacity, the new owners just updated the terms of service so they can collect data on you, including for very open-ended "legal enforcement"; and then sell it to "potential buyers" all without your consent
fishfag
you should be fine if you dont update it to 3.0, but if you would like an alternative anyways, check out Dark Audacity
whipshaw
Take from myself and my partner who are software developers and electronic musicians: the specific PR that's been added *after amendments made based on community feedback* is *not that bad* but it shows that they want to start treating the project more like a company product than an open source project.
If you're already using Windows--or have any closed source application on your computer--you're already being tracked in much worse ways than what Audacity wants to do. Audacity wants to track, in the context of error reporting:
- Your IP
- Your OS
- CPU data/number of cores
- Ping their servers to check for updates
- Audacity version/information about your Audacity
Originally, they were going to send this information to Google and Yandex, but will now be storing it on their private servers.
The privacy policy update is bad but isn't yet reflected in the code itself.
Advice to those who want to have super secure open source software machines: don't update and keep an eye on this.
For those who help build open source projects, consider supporting forks of Audacity that are community run.
Tldr: if you do not use a machine you have built specifically to be secure (ie. are on Windows, Mac, have closed-source software on your machine, or use Google), this is IRRELEVANT to the information companies already collect on you. If your interest is in having a super secure open source machine, don't update to Audacity 3.0 and watch this closely. Consider supporting any community driven efforts to fork this project.
